I have recently been inspired by to post psychoanalyses of films, and perhaps other mediums of cultural expression and storytelling. Though I am not as skilled as Jeremy, and given that this particular piece was constructed before my formal education in Psychology*, I have a lot of fun attempting to think deeply about the underlying structures of a story and film. To identify what makes them compelling, why they resonate more than others might, and all the ancient and seemingly subconscious throughlines that might emerge.

If you even remotely enjoy this, be sure to head over to ’s Substack to read more thorough and intriguing pieces.

*For fun and an extra-raw/unvarnished feel I have provided images of the original notes and done minimal editing.

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Characters, Settings, and Symbols

Overbearing mother archetype

Well incorporated and attentive father

Daydreaming (white rabbit). Disrupted by external forces attempting to change sense of Self.

Dream state induced by a Life changing decision.

Dreams equivalent to/representative of Alice’s connection to creative ideas

Too big, too small. Having to change sizes throughout different stages of development in order to optimise and diversify experiences.

Alice: open-minded strong sense of Self cultivated by father

Willingness to step through doors/answering the call to adventure and demonstrating curiosity and bravery towards confronting the unknown. Essential qualities for incorporating and pruning one’s personality.

Alice: “this is my dream“. Acknowledgement of existential and individual control/responsibility. Internal locus of control (Internal is essentially the setting once down the rabbit hole).

Underland: underworld archetype a journey into the unconscious et cetera

Absolum: absolute, wise representation of God or shaman, external call to meaning, transformative, psychedelic, shamanistic.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum: representation of psyche’s indecisiveness, representation of duality.

Red Queen: the negative feminine psyche: chaotic, emotional, irrational, judgemental, vein, commanding, desperate for love/companionship, distrusting, insecure, and self sabotaging

Red Queen’s Card Knights: represent gambling, vice, random and chaotic, rudimentary, unskilled, types of games often played by criminals scam artists or young children.

White Queen: positive feminine of psyche: calm, collected, competent, confident, knowledgeable, kind, compassionate, loving, elegant, poised, conscientiousness, encouraging, nurturing, curing.

White Queen’s Chess-Piece Knights: represent intelligence, order, combined with infinite potential, calculation, sophistication, and higher faculties such as planning, theory of mind, strategy and represents a more mature type of play.

Hatter: paternal figure to Alice in Wonderland. His being “bonkers” makes him a stand in for her own father/internal father. Her father valued “thinking differently” and the Hatter reinforces that practice.

Cheshire Cat: psyche’s cunning, intelligence, cowardice, calculative, rational/minimise involvement by avoidance.

Stayne: representation of the predatory male. He makes himself appealing, via dark traits (particularly Machiavellian), to the negative feminine because he and his kind are otherwise —and for that reason— unsatisfactory to any rational, mature, and well integrated woman.

Notes and Conceptualizations

Girls —all young people/children— are told “who they are what they must do et cetera”. Alice’s episode/adventure is brought on by the transformative proposition to wed, i.e., transform from Girl to Woman. Alice must stop being a girl in order to make a woman’s decision which means Alice comes to the point where she must make a stand for her own autonomy and Self. This first manifests in Underland. Upon arrival she is pushed and pulled by external forces/actors, but eventually Alice has to stand for her own sense of autonomy/Self in order to go save the Hatter.

A Call to Action: Alice must slay the Jabberwocky in order to tame the red queen (takeaway her power). Essential part of ego development in order to enter adulthood and act as a prosocial individual. Taking away the Red Queen’s power over the Self allows the positive feminine (White Queen) to be properly integrated.

Before killing the Jabberwocky Alice cuts out its tongue. This demonstrates that the first step to defeating the negative feminine (the Red Queen) is to take away its voice and stop listening to her and the innate impulses she represents.

The Negative Feminine however cannot be destroyed. It still exists within the psyche but only as an instinct, an impulse and building block to the higher forms of development; it must be mediated by the prefrontal cortex and rational thought. This is why the Red Queen is not killed but instead exiled to the outer lands of the unconscious.

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-CMB (2020)

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Mental Health Awareness Month is a good moment to take stock of what “Mental Healthcare” has expanded into culturally, and to be clear about both its value and its limits. Awareness is not the same thing as automatic intervention, and not every form of distress benefits from being continuously processed through a therapeutic frame. It’s also important to remember that therapy, like any intervention, has constraints and potential harmful effects when it is extended beyond its appropriate scope or duration, especially when normal life gets absorbed into a permanent “therapizing” mindset.

Long-term Therapy and “Prophylactic” Therapy

Long-term talk therapy, except for those with severe personality disorders, major psychopathology, chronic suicidality, or genuinely debilitating mental illness, is not evidence-based, and at some point probably becomes iatrogenic (causes or worsens mental health issues). The issue is that therapy culture increasingly treats everyone as though they belong in those categories, which normalizes indefinite treatment.

Most people sitting in perpetual talk therapy are not borderline, psychotic, or profoundly dysfunctional. They are normal people who went to therapy for a breakup, anxiety, their parents divorcing (likely years ago), acute trauma (despite most cases never developing into PTSD and many that do substantially improve or even resolve without formal intervention) or some other transient life issue, and then never left. Even PTSD often substantially resolves within 6 months to ~1 year, with the steepest recovery typically occurring during that period.

Research preceding the current wave of “Mental Health Awareness” along with social media driven self-diagnosis and diagnostic creep, (i.e., research conducted when those in treatment were in treatment under more clinically rigorous and clinically sound preconditions) by Lambert et al. (2001) found that, for 50% of patients, approximately 21 sessions were required to reach clinically significant improvements, and that 75% of patients could be predicted to have improved by their 40th session. Shortly following, research by Barkham et al. (2006), utilising the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation-Outcome Measure (CORE-OM), found that the vast majority of clients entering treatment (78.8%) were legitimately struggling and that among those, 61.7% achieved reliable and clinically significant improvement (RCSI) by the 12th session. So, not only did a meaningful majority of distressed individuals make clinically significant progress , in relatively short order, but just over one-fifth (21.2%) of those who initiated therapy were not clinically struggling. Finally, an analysis out of the British Journal of Psychiatry (King, 2015) indicated that “Duration of therapy was inversely correlated with outcome” [emphasis added]. Essentially, if one is in therapy for a long time, it’s because of clinically severe and debilitating mental maladies and not likely to be someone who regularly maintains employment, goes to school, or is otherwise percievably well-adjusted.

Best evidence indicates that short-term therapy is going to be the most beneficial to the overwhelming majority of people seeking Mental Healthcare. Therapy should be short-term and moving toward closure, or there should be a legitimate diagnosis and level of impairment severe enough to actually justify indefinite treatment. The problem is that therapy culture increasingly treats ordinary distress as though it belongs in the latter category. It is best if people seriously audit or flag their therapy if it goes beyond so many sessions, and most certainly if it has been a year+ and there is not clear progress toward resolution and closure.

Beyond that point the therapy itself can become the problem: endless rumination, emotional hyper-surveillance, grievance-rehearsal, identity fixation around suffering, dependency on therapeutic mediation, and interpreting ordinary human distress as pathology requiring continual management. We now live in a culture where people treat having a therapist like having a dentist or a personal trainer —just a standing feature of adulthood— despite there being no evidence for long-term therapy or prophylactic therapy in the majority who are subject to this practice, whereas there is substantial and growing evidence for its capacity to cause or worsen mental illness (iatrogenesis).

Restigmatise Mental Illness!

I’m saying this again here because this is just another vector of the cultural ailments from destigmatisation (diagnostics creep and social media / self-diagnosis)!

There is also a broader cultural issue in how “destigmatization” has unfolded. Destigmatizing seeking help was necessary and beneficial, but it often blurred the line between “seeking help” and “being mentally ill or disordered”. While Destigmatising seeking help was admirable and necessary, the destigmatisation movement’s failure to parse “seeking help” from being “mentally ill/disordered” before removing stigma and negative connotations has been nothing short of an annoying tragedy.

Seeing as perceived suffering is suffering nonetheless, it has led to a lot of senseless self-inflicted/self-diagnosed/self-manifested suffering that is objectively worse —being commonplace— than the proportion of people who avoided seeking help before the inception of destigmatisation.

Coupled with the consequences of deinstitutionalisation —reform would’ve been better— and the cultural acceptance, nay, embrace, of mental illness and disorder, the imprudence of the destigmatisation impulse and the resulting degeneration of society will be movement’s legacy.

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Lately, I have been inundated with feminist mothers remarking that their daughters “love LEGOs” as much or more than their sons or peer boys.

The implication these mothers tend to be making is that girls are as interested in things as boys and therefore masculine —I guess?— or by some absurd logic, destined for the STEM fields. That’s the emphasis and usually the context I am encountering anyway… But has anyone else noticed the current state of LEGO sets on the shelves??

Yes, the content is often still vehicles or superheros, but increasingly disney characters and narrative based. Nonetheless, even if the content and colors are still more “masculine”, the format has been vastly feminized.

To no surprise either. There has been a long and very public endeavor by LEGO to make their product more appealing to girls —they had tried and failed with their more superficial changes. So, it shouldn’t be taken as coincidence that as the more female-typical play preferences (narrative context, defined goals, guided assembly) became a key component of the new LEGO sets, that there is a newfound surge of girls liking LEGOS “as much as boys”.

When it comes to sex differences in play, there is a consistent pattern in the literature:

Males, on average, show more interest in thing-oriented, system-manipulation, open-ended play.

Females, on average, show more interest in people-oriented, structured, goal-directed, narrative play.

This would obviously result in different toy preference. Instead of consulting the literature and understanding that there was no misogyny involved in LEGOs being predominantly sought by boys, activists instead pressured LEGO to close this gap. Which, to be fair, why wouldn’t LEGO want to double their customers??? So, the marketing attempts and research began.

Research —allegedly— commissioned by the LEGO Group suggests another sexed difference in playing with their products: boys often seek to embody characters (e.g., “be” Batman), while girls often seek to embody their own interests within the character (e.g., “making Batman be them”). This study —if it exists— highlights how children engage differently with themes of creativity and identity. Nonetheless, to the extent that the existence of this study is contested, anyone who watches children in a play setting —or ever was a child themself for that matter— can observe the described phenomenon for themselves; it is far from farfetched.

Regardless of wheteher you are convinced by that, LEGO Group has engaged in so much research, they ought to be considered their own psychological field.

After earlier superficial attempts like Belville (which underperformed), LEGO ran extensive research in the 2000s and found:

• Many girls disengaged from open-ended brick bins faster

• They preferred context + characters + clear goals

• Early friction (unclear builds, failure points) reduced sustained play

So with LEGO Friends (2012) and similar lines, they intentionally built in:

• Narrative worlds (Heartlake City, named characters)

• Guided assembly (clear step sequences, quick wins)

• Aesthetic cohesion (color/story consistency)

LEGO deliberately redesigned parts of its product line to appeal to girls by incorporating features that align with female-typical play preferences, such as narrative context, defined goals, and guided assembly. Shifting away from primarily open-ended brick play, toward highly structured, kit-based builds—essentially paint-by-numbers construction experiences— with predefined outcomes. These newer sets emphasized step-by-step instructions, numbered bags, narrative framing, character-driven worlds, and tightly guided assembly sequences, reducing ambiguity and front-loading successful completion. This shift successfully increased girls’ participation, but it also changed what “LEGO” represents as a category.

LEGO used to function as a fairly tight cultural proxy for a specific, male-skewed style of play. As a result, when parents make the statement “my daughter likes LEGO”, presenting it as “stereotype-breaking”. The usual implied chain is: she’s interested in things over people→she has a more system-oriented or analytical disposition→she might be inclined toward engineering/technical domains. Even if they don’t spell it out, it’s clearly the implication they’re gesturing at; despite such an implication being erroneous, even when it was about boys (to my knowledge there is no LEGO to engineer pipeline; enjoying LEGOs is not career-predicting).

What’s more, is it is an attempted status signal of their “gender”-neutral haughty parenting style prowess: “she’s not confined to traditional feminine patterns.” —ignoring that the category changed. They are misreading the signal, treating a now-feminized version of a product as if it still functions as a single, stable proxy of the original, masculine-coded version of LEGO play. Girls have not moved towards the masculine, nor are they demonstrating the same play preferences as boys. LEGO met the girls in the feminine. They spent decades —and I imagine a small fortune— making a product that appeals to those feminine play preferences. And that’s fine…mostly.

I obviously take no issue with LEGO Group appealing to girls’ play preferences. I am happy to see both sexes with any screenless toy options, especially if they are enthusiastic about those toys. Also, not all aspects and “benefits” of LEGO play are lost by these kits. The children are still exercising sequencing and error correction, mentally rotating objects, 2D to 3D mapping, and learning constraints and part relationships. The kits also make LEGOs more collaborative, parents and children can work on shared construction with a more defined, and therfore, shared end goal. All of which make LEGOs a fantastic form of play for anyone regardless of age and sex.

Where I must take some issue though, is that these guided-assembly kits have become more and more the default for both sexes. In other words, in an effort to appease the play-preferences of one sex, the other is being pulled by the incentives of convenience, indiscriminant marketing, and the lack of salient distinction or value of the original, more open-ended, iterative building, masculine form of the product —a passive devaluing of masculine play in the already overly feminized child environment.

Lastly, I most certainly take issue with the idea that we are suppossed to pretend that liking LEGO kits carries the same characteristics, implications, and social perceptions as liking open-ended brick bins did in the preceding decades. No, your daughter is not more “like the boys”, nor is her play preference more oriented toward STEM than the generations before her. LEGOs changed, girls didn’t.

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Claim

Widespread adoption of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs will reduce obesity prevalence while simultaneously increasing the prevalence of lifestyle-preventable diseases —particularly dementia, frailty, sarcopenia, falls, and late-life dependency— due to predictable behavioral substitution and the removal of exercise-mediated protective mechanisms. Even under the most charitable assumptions, widespread GLP-1 use produces at best a net-neutral shift in population disease burden, yet there are strong reasons to expect net negative unintended consequences due to behavioral substitution, physiological trade-offs, and Peltzman effects.

This outcome follows directly from established physiology, psychology, and public-health trade-off dynamics.

Side Effects Already Associated with GLP-1s

• Anhedonia (duh, see BONUS below)

• Intestinal obstruction

• Loss of skeletal muscle

• Decrease in heart size and heart cell size

Known preventive mechanisms (weight-independent)

It is already well established that cardio exercise, resistance training, and diet quality are among the largest modifiable levers for preventing multiple major diseases independent of weight loss, including:

• Dementia (Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia)

• Cognitive decline and mild cognitive impairment

• Sarcopenia

• Frailty syndrome

• Osteoporosis

• Falls and fractures

• Loss of functional independence with aging

• Cardiovascular dysfunction not strictly tied to obesity

• Stroke risk via vascular elasticity and cerebral perfusion

• Chronic inflammation

• Insulin resistance at the tissue level

• Depression and anxiety disorders

These effects arise from mechanisms such as:

• mechanical loading of muscle and bone

• mitochondrial biogenesis

• myokine signaling

• improved insulin sensitivity

• autonomic regulation

• increased cerebral blood flow

• neurotrophic factor expression (e.g., BDNF)

GLP-1 drugs do not activate these mechanisms.

Weight loss alone does not substitute for these inputs.

Mechanistic removal implies loss of protection

If a population:

• loses weight pharmacologically,

• but does not perform cardio exercise,

• does not perform resistance training,

• and does not improve diet quality,

then the weight-independent protective mechanisms listed above do not occur.

No stimulus → no adaptation → no protection.

Behavioral Substitution

Human behavior reliably exhibits effort substitution when an effective shortcut becomes available.

When a tool:

• produces visible results,

• minimizes discomfort,

• requires little sustained effort,

• and is socially normalized,

a non-trivial proportion of users will reduce or abandon harder complementary behaviors.

This is a description of:

• allostasis,

• habit formation,

• least-effort equilibrium,

• and risk compensation (Peltzman-style effects).

Assuming otherwise requires assuming humans behave contrary to well-documented psychological tendencies.

Intermittent pharmacologic reliance worsens the effect

GLP-1 use is unlikely to be continuous for many users. A more realistic pattern is cyclical:

• weight gain → drug use

• weight loss → discontinuation

• weight regain → re-initiation

This pattern:

• reinforces externalized control (mental health implications, see: external locus of control)

• suppresses durable habit formation,

• trains reliance on pharmacologic correction rather than behavioral adaptation.

Each cycle further displaces resistance training, cardio exercise, and diet discipline as default responses.

The non-trivial proportion threshold

This prediction does not depend on majority behavior.

If even a non-trivial proportion of GLP-1 users —conservatively 20–30%— do the following:

• skip resistance training,

• maintain low physical activity,

• rely primarily on pharmacologic weight control,

• and cycle on and off the drug rather than building durable habits,

then population-level disease patterns shift measurably.

At that scale, the following outcomes become likely:

• dementia incidence rises

• cognitive decline rises

• frailty and sarcopenia rise

• falls, fractures, and dependency rise

• cardiovascular and functional resilience decline despite lower body weight

This prediction does not depend on speculation or future behavior. We already have population-level data that bound the size of the relevant cohort.

Across adult and obese populations:

• ~70–85% do not engage in regular resistance training

• ~40–60% do not meet minimum aerobic activity guidelines

• Long-term adherence to lifestyle-only weight maintenance is rare

• Discontinuation, weight regain, and re-initiation of obesity drugs is common

Early real-world GLP-1 use shows the same pattern:

• significant muscle loss during weight reduction (indicating absent resistance training),

• weight regain after discontinuation,

• and repeated pharmacologic re-entry rather than durable habit formation.

When these behaviors are intersected—not treated independently—it is conservative to estimate that at least 20–30% of GLP-1 users.

That fraction may be higher, but it does not need to be.

A large minority failing to engage the largest preventive levers—cardio exercise, resistance training, and diet quality—is sufficient to measurably increase the prevalence of dementia, frailty, sarcopenia, falls, fractures, and late-life dependency, even as obesity rates decline.

Disease Burden Redistributes and Likely Increases

Reducing obesity will reduce obesity-linked diseases, including:

• obesity-driven type 2 diabetes,

• obesity-driven coronary artery disease,

• obesity-driven joint degeneration.

However, cardio exercise, resistance training, and diet quality prevent a separate class of diseases through mechanisms not replicated by weight loss, including maintenance of muscle mass, bone density, cardiovascular capacity, insulin sensitivity, cerebral blood flow, and neurotrophic signaling. GLP-1–mediated weight reduction does not activate these mechanisms, and rapid weight loss without resistance training accelerates lean-mass loss and bone demineralization.

If exercise and lifestyle behaviors decline or are never adopted, the protection they provide is absent, not delayed, and diseases prevented by those behaviors therefore increase in absolute incidence, including dementia, sarcopenia, frailty, falls, fractures, functional cardiovascular collapse, and long-term dependency.

The result is not disease elimination but disease redistribution with amplification:

• fewer obesity-mediated failures,

• more neurodegenerative, musculoskeletal, and functional failures driven by loss of strength, fitness, and resilience.

At best, reductions in obesity-driven disease are offset by increases in lifestyle-preventable disease, producing a net-neutral outcome. More plausibly, total chronic disease burden increases, because the strongest preventive levers for late-life cognitive and functional health are removed while pharmacologic weight loss introduces physiological vulnerabilities that compound risk over time. Disease re-clusters around what was no longer prevented, shifting morbidity toward longer-lasting, more disabling, and more dependency-producing conditions.

Dementia as the delayed signal

Dementia is the clearest downstream signal because:

• it is strongly exercise-dependent,

• it is poorly reversible,

• it manifests decades after missed prevention windows,

• it carries disproportionate individual and societal cost.

The cohort that avoids sustained physical stressors in midlife will later present as:

• cognitively impaired,

• physically fragile,

• dependent,

• and largely non-recoverable.

This is how prevention failures surface in aging populations.

Orthogonal proof: the argument is overdetermined

This prediction is supported independently by multiple domains:

• Physiology: exercise prevents diseases GLP-1s do not

• Psychology: shortcuts displace effort for a non-trivial subset

• Pharmacology: weight rebounds reinforce reuse, not habit formation

• Public health: minority behavior can dominate outcomes

These lines converge on the same conclusion.

The argument stands even if any one domain is partially wrong.

Analogies

• Seatbelts: reduced crash mortality, increased risky driving → injury patterns shifted, not eliminated

• Statins: cholesterol control does not replace exercise-mediated cardiovascular resilience

• SSRIs: symptom suppression does not build psychological coping capacity

• Crash dieting: weight loss without behavioral change guarantees rebound

GLP-1s fit this pattern exactly.

Prediction

If GLP-1 drugs are widely adopted without strong coupling to resistance training, cardio exercise, and diet quality, then:

• obesity prevalence will decline,

• some obesity-related diseases will decline,

• but lifestyle-preventable diseases — especially dementia, frailty, sarcopenia, falls, and dependency — will rise in prevalence relative to a lifestyle-maintained counterfactual.

This outcome is predictable.

Compressed Version (Archival)

A population-wide tool that reduces obesity but displaces cardio exercise, resistance training, and diet quality will not eliminate disease burden; it will redistribute it.

GLP-1 drugs reduce body weight but do not activate the physiological mechanisms that protect against dementia, frailty, sarcopenia, cardiovascular resilience loss, and late-life dependency.

Human behavior reliably substitutes shortcuts for effort. Even if only 20–30% of users rely on pharmacologic weight control while skipping exercise, population disease curves will shift. Public health operates on tails, not averages.

The likely result is fewer obesity-mediated diseases alongside more neurodegenerative, musculoskeletal, and functional decline. Dementia will serve as the delayed signal of missed prevention.

This is not a failure of the drug. It is a failure of assuming biological efficacy substitutes for behavioral adaptation.

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BONUS:

Though already emerging, the issues of simply not anchoring one’s day and interactions to meals has a rich and robust literature.

Eating is a primary reward system, not just calorie intake

Food is one of the core dopaminergic reward drivers in humans. Not just consumption, but:

• anticipation

• effort to obtain

• sensory engagement

• social context (shared meals, ritual)

These activate:

• dopamine (motivation, salience)

• endogenous opioids (pleasure, satiety)

• serotonin (mood regulation)

When GLP-1s blunt appetite and food salience, they intentionally suppress this reward loop.

That doesn’t just reduce overeating.
It reduces reward density in daily life.

Anhedonia follows directly from reward deactivation

There is extensive literature showing that chronic dampening of reward pathways—even when “beneficial” for impulse control—leads to:

• flattened affect

• reduced motivation

• decreased novelty-seeking

• social withdrawal

• depressive symptoms

This is seen with:

• dopamine antagonists

• appetite suppressants

• some SSRIs

• chronic caloric restriction

GLP-1s sit squarely in this family of effects.

So when users report:

“I don’t enjoy food anymore”
“Nothing really excites me”

That is exactly what the model predicts.

Food is a social glue, not a private pleasure

Anthropology, sociology, and psychiatry all converge on this:

Shared meals:

• synchronize affect

• reinforce social bonds

• regulate stress

• reduce loneliness

Blunting appetite doesn’t just change eating. It changes:

• willingness to gather

• participation in rituals

• family and community routines

Loss of appetite → fewer shared meals → weaker social reinforcement → higher depression risk.

This is especially dangerous in:

• older adults

• socially isolated individuals

• people already prone to depression

GLP-1s create a “reward vacuum” if not replaced

Here’s the key systems insight:

If food reward is pharmacologically suppressed and the person does not replace it with:

• physical exertion reward (exercise highs),

• competence reward (strength gains),

• social reward (shared activity),

then the system doesn’t rebalance.

It collapses into low-reward equilibrium.

That’s classic anhedonia.

And because GLP-1 use often coincides with less exercise (behavioral substitution), the replacement rewards often never appear.

This feeds directly back into disease risk

Anhedonia is not just “feeling flat.”

It predicts:

• reduced physical activity

• reduced adherence to health behaviors

• cognitive decline risk

• depression and anxiety

• social isolation

Which means it amplifies the very disease-increase mechanism you’re already describing.

This is not a side note.
It’s a multiplier.

Bottom line

Chronic appetite suppression predictably blunts dopaminergic and social reward systems. Because food is a primary source of motivation, pleasure, and social bonding, its pharmacologic dampening—especially when not replaced by exercise or competence-based rewards—produces anhedonia, social withdrawal, and depressive symptoms. This further reduces engagement in protective behaviors, reinforcing the increase in frailty, cognitive decline, and dependency.

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Combat-related PTSD is a complex stress disorder that is typically induced from the experience of combat, which is essentially a confrontation with human malevolence committed on or by the Self. This is one of two major distinctions that separate Combat-related PTSD from other stress disorders. The other major distinction is prolonged exposure; though it is not uncommon in other traumatic circumstances such as persistent incidents of rape, in Combat-related PTSD multiple incidents and stress immersion are commonplace.

These distinctions are not meagre by any means; witnessing, committing, and/or being exposed to some of the most abhorrent human act (killing) as well as the physiological responses such as raised cortisol levels and sporadic and prolonged adrenaline spikes make Combat-related PTSD a uniquely reinforced stress reaction. Although the term PTSD is relatively new in modern society, the psychological complications from warfare are as old as civilisation itself.

“One of the earliest examples was enshrined by Herodotus, who wrote of an Athenian warrior struck blind ‘without blow of sword or dart’ when a soldier standing next to him was killed. The classic term – “shell-shock”- dates to World War I; ‘battle fatigue’, ‘combat exhaustion’, and ‘war stress’ were used in World War II”. (Satel, 2011, p.41)

Much like Combat-related PTSD’s persistence in history it perpetuates in the individual as well. Like many mental health disorders, treatment of PTSD is complex; however, the first – and seemingly most formidable – obstacle is diagnosis.

Currently, the military is utilizing screenings with self-report checklists called PCLs (PTSD checklists) which have been validated as a useful way to increase effective screening for returning troops.

Recent research has validated the PCL with soldiers returning from combat; these data provide evidence for the utility of this screening measure in Operation Enduring Freedom/ Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) soldiers. The PCL presents 17 items corresponding to the core diagnostic symptoms of PTSD. Respondents rate how much each symptom bothers them on a 5-point scale from 1 (“not at all”) to 5 (“extremely”) and the sum of the items provides an index of PTSD symptom severity.” (Keane, Marx, Wisco, 2012, p.8)

Nevertheless, these “self-report” checklists are limited to the willingness of the individual doing the reporting to admit they are experiencing symptoms. Putting aside the feelings of responsibility and being valuable to their units – for now – the individual is starkly aware of the implications of a positive screening and the stigmatization that prevails their society. “An airline stewardess moved one of my patients, in uniform, because the person in the next seat didn’t want to sit beside ‘the likes of him.’” (Shay, McCain, & Cleland, 2010, p.245) being one of many examples.

Another issue that affects the self-reports being answered honestly is the communal normalisation of symptoms within units and peer groups; or in-group baseline distortions. This is a seemingly unresearched or even unacknowledged element in the auditing of diagnostic integrity; no academic work could be found through all this author’s research. Speaking first-hand, the author witnessed within his own unit that there was an unconscious normalisation of PTSD symptoms among the returning marines. As social creatures, human beings use social interaction as a reference point to “what is normal”. But what happens when the base-line experience of an entire sub-group shifts within itself? When one finds themselves unable to sleep, anxious in a particular environment, impulsive, consuming intoxicating substances, and/or in a depressed state and compare themselves to the sub-group they are immersed in – and in many cases limited-to – they find that they are essentially “on-par” with their peers. Thus, creating a falsified or skewed feedback loop which makes the rate of occurrence or level of symptoms appear like the status-quo. Though this is anecdotal, it would seem that research on this issue is merited if the limitations of self-reporting are to be overcome.

In addition to the limitations of honest self-reports there has been research indicating that even when there are no discernible symptoms of PTSD there may be physiological imprints that indicate the trauma and the possibility of symptoms arising later in life. “Detectable damage and physiological disruption of normal amygdala-hippocampus functioning may be present but clinically indeterminable (i.e., the typical symptoms of PTSD are not present.).” (Krippner/Paulson, 2010, p.9) This realization is a devastating blow to the integrity of PTSD screening of returning troops.

Lastly, an issue with PTSD that is often realized in reference to its resistance to treatment but rarely in its opposition to diagnosis is the paradoxical element of being a “normal reaction” disorder.

As Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, aptly observed in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 1995, PTSD is the only disorder that patients want to have; unlike all other psychiatric conditions, which imply defects of some kind, a diagnosis of PTSD confirms the patient’s normality. (Boone, 2011, p.19)

The reaction of PTSD is a normal psychobiological response to traumatic events; and most importantly a key component to the subject’s survival – or, at the very least they believe it to be a core component of their survival. It is this belief/understanding that reinforces and attaches the subject to their PTSD that is reinforced every day they continue to survive. This is what makes PTSD such a formidable and persistent mental health condition to diagnose.

A patient that believes their existence is dependent on their disorder is unlikely to seek treatment; and even if they are involuntarily screened, they are unlikely to report anything that might force them to be exposed to treatment. Along with their dependence on the disorder, there is little incentive to threaten one’s “lifeline” while simultaneously taking on the social stigma that comes with it. Until these issues are addressed, diagnosis of PTSD as well as its treatment will continue to be compromised from an effectual application.

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References

Boone, K. N. (2011). The Paradox of PTSD. The Wilson Quarterly (Washington), 35(4), 18–22.

Paulson, D. S., & Krippner, S. (2010). History of the Diagnosis and Treatment of PTSD. In Haunted by combat: Understanding PTSD in war veterans including women, reservists, and those coming back from iraq (pp. 8-23). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

SATEL, S. (2011). PTSD’s Diagnostic Trap. Policy Review, 165, 41–53.

Shay, J., McCain, J., & Cleland, S. M. (2010). Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. New York: Scribner.

Wisco, B. E., Marx, B. P., & Keane, T. M. (2012). Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Military Medicine, 177(8S), 7-13. doi:10.7205/milmed-d-12-00111

For a more in-depth account, check out this outstanding and illuminating piece by

-CMB (2020)

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Preface:

“Every generation is accused of moral or cultural decline”.

That is a familiar pattern of intergenerational critique. Yet not all such accusations are baseless. So, let me quell that riposte right here. As someone deeply read in the literature on generational differences, and drawing on scholars like Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, the accusations leveled at Gen Z as being distinctly and novelly troubling appear exceedingly warranted. Gen Z’s transformation is not merely attitudinal but structural: a cohort shaped by digital immersion, safetyism, and institutional fragility. Gen Z represents a genuine rupture, not a continuation. The psychological, moral, and civic patterns emerging from this cohort are historically novel, quantifiably distinct, and deeply consequential. What we are witnessing is not the familiar rhythm of youthful rebellion or overprotection, but the formation of a generation fundamentally rewired in its relationship to truth, risk, authority, and freedom. We owe it to them, as much as to our society as a whole, to start acknowledging and remedying this malformation and breakdown in generational development and social formation.

Increasingly, there is converging evidence that Gen Z exhibits an unprecedentedly high rate of anti-democratic, even authoritarian behaviors and attitudes. From the fascism embodied by ANTIFA, to blind adherence to authority, to the desire to impose governmental force upon those who live differently or hold dissenting views, patterns emerge that alarm both scholars and observers of democratic norms.

Among one of the clearest examples of this impulse is the movement to abolish the Electoral College. What is often presented as a pursuit of democracy is, at root, a covertly authoritarian ambition: to replace institutional safeguards with unrestrained majority rule, concentrating power in the hands of the most populous regions, and effectively establishing a permanent elite aristocracy. This single policy preference reveals the deeper tendencies that define the generational ethos —the willingness to subvert liberal structures in favor of immediate majoritarian control, moral enforcement, and coercive governance.

This essay examines these trends, identifies their manifestations, and traces the cultural and institutional causes that have nurtured them. From the drive to dismantle the Electoral College, to the normalization of censorship and pandemic mandates, to the reflexive tolerance for coercive authority, the behavioral patterns of Gen Z reveal a generation increasingly comfortable with authoritarian, anti-democratic, and pro-fascist forms of control.

Mob Rule Disguised as Democracy

According to a 2020 UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion youth oversample found that 56% of respondents aged 18–29 support abolishing the Electoral College outright, a figure that is nearly double the national average.

The data is unambiguous: for Gen Z, the Electoral College isn’t a stabilizing pillar of liberal democracy; it’s a barrier to what they perceive as “fair” democracy. But this perception betrays a shallow understanding of democratic architecture. The Electoral College was never designed to reflect pure majoritarian will —it was built to balance power among states, mediate regional dominance, and prevent populous centers from swallowing the rest of the nation.

That Gen Z rejects this system so overwhelmingly reveals both a shift in civic instinct and a philosophical inversion: they interpret checks on power as antidemocratic, and direct, unmediated will as inherently virtuous. In this sense, their impulse to dismantle the Electoral College mirrors the broader generational trend toward majoritarian authoritarianism —a belief that legitimacy flows solely from numbers, not from structure, process, or principle.

These calls to abolish the Electoral College are not, as they claim, a “pursuit of democracy”. They are a profoundly illiberal impulse, an attempt to replace the safeguards of the republic with mob rule, while consolidating power in the hands of a permanent, likely coastal, aristocracy. Locke warned that unrestrained majorities could easily become tyrants; the Founders built the Electoral College to prevent exactly this —the tyranny of the majority, the rule of the mob over the whole nation.

To discard this system entirely is to invite the domination of the most populous regions, where concentrated numbers, wealth, and cultural influence guarantee control. Under a purely popular vote, rural America—the breadbasket, the energy basin, the regions that sustain the nation —would be politically irrelevant. Entire swaths of the Union would be silenced, their interests subordinated to the ambitions of a few dense, affluent, and culturally ascendant cities. This would not be “progress”; it would be illiberalism dressed as fairness.

The advocates of abolition, whether fully aware or not, are pursuing a subtle aristocracy: its permanent rule, legitimized by the rhetoric of equality and popular sovereignty. What they present as liberation is in fact concentration, what they call fairness is domination. They do not seek cross-regional coalition or compromise; they seek a system where their faction never loses, where dissenting regions are permanently disenfranchised by arithmetic alone.

This danger cannot be separated from the reality of universal enfranchisement. Mass voting, untempered by responsibility, stake, or civic prudence, already amplifies the power of the majority at the expense of the whole republic. Remove the Electoral College, and the tyranny of the majority becomes absolute: the coast rules the country, the interior has no recourse, and the nation’s foundational principle of balance between interests collapses.

To preserve democratic liberalism and the republic, one must defend the Electoral College —not as an ideal, but as a bulwark against the ambitions of a faction that would convert democracy into permanent aristocracy. Liberty is not the will of the majority alone; it is the structure that compels every faction to negotiate, persuade, and respect the diversity of the Union. Any proposal to abolish the College without, at the very least, addressing the consequences of universal enfranchisement is reckless, illiberal, and morally indefensible.

The lesson is clear: the movement to remove the Electoral College is not reform —it is an assault on democratic liberty, a covert attempt to enshrine the rule of the most influential few over the many, and a betrayal of the principles upon which this nation was founded. Those who support it claim fairness; history and reason show tyrannical ambition.

The Cult of Safety and the Death of Liberalism

The COVID era revealed, with terrifying clarity, just how quickly a population can surrender freedom when “safety” is treated as the highest good. This period functioned as a crucible, a real-world test of civic judgment and moral evaluation, revealing how deeply the generation internalized compliance, obedience, and the prioritization of safety over liberalism. Among the young, the reflex was not to question authority, but to demand more of it. They did not inherit the liberal suspicion of power —they demanded that power intervene.

Those under forty —or even sixty for that matter— who complied without question; who sought no exemption, who shouldered no serious personal risk, and yet treated dissenters as pariahs— demonstrated a profound moral and civic collapse. To support vaccine mandates and lockdown policies that coerced, segregated, and punished citizens was to endorse nakedly anti-democratic governance. The pandemic saw the most extensive collusion between government and corporate power in modern history —a partnership that produced the largest upward transfer of wealth ever recorded. Whether one calls that fascism or merely pro-fascist behavior is a matter of taxonomy, but certainly not substance.

Among those aged 18–29, roughly 70% received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, despite being among the lowest-risk populations. It was widely understood prior to the vaccine’s release —as highlighted by the Great Barrington Declaration (published October 2020)— that it was unlikely to prevent transmission, and this prediction was empirically confirmed before this cohort became broadly eligible (e.g., Provincetown, MA outbreak, Veterans Affairs data). Meaning it could not have been out of cautious prudence; but compliance elevated to a moral imperative. What makes this an unparalleled moral failure is that it was done without reflection on the ethical ramifications: the enforcement of vaccine mandates created a rigid class system of vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals, effectively stratifying society by compliance with government directives.

The extremity of this failure is even more striking when we recognize that these young people were taking a drug they did not actually need. By definition, the risk outweighed any benefit for them individually, yet they proceeded without question. This was more than mere obedience —it was active, zealous support, a willingness to “lay down their own safety” in moral endorsement of corporo-fascist overeach. They signaled that compliance was not just expected, but virtuous, elevating submission into a form of moral heroism in their own eyes. The consequences were material and moral: millions of Americans were effectively disenfranchised, denied access to employment, education, and public life based solely on vaccination status.

Investigative committees and other authoritative bodies documented the downstream effects extensively: disenfranchisement of 8 million Americans, racial disparities disproportionately affecting Black and other minority communities, reinforcement of socioeconomic inequalities, and predictable and measurable incidence of injuries, hospitalizations, and deaths linked to the vaccines. Studies, including Skidmore, suggest that when controlling for deaths with versus of COVID, the vaccines may have caused more harm and death than they prevented, particularly among low-risk young populations, contributing to excess deaths across Western nations. The mandate system, enforced socially and legally, amounted to structural coercion that violated basic liberal values such as bodily autonomy, freedom of conscience, and freedom of movement. That a generation voluntarily submitted to these risks—taking a drug they did not medically need—demonstrates a profound moral abdication, elevating compliance above reason, ethics, and even self-preservation.

Moreover, this compliance occurred within a web of government-corporate collusion. Corporations became agents of enforcement, policing access and rewarding obedience, amplifying the concentration of power and wealth. The pandemic facilitated one of the largest upward transfers of wealth in modern history. Gen  Z’s uncritical participation in this system demonstrated a willingness to reinforce authoritarian structures for the sake of safety, without assessing the moral cost.

The young mistook submission for compassion, coercion for care, and censorship for safety. Liberty was treated as a nuisance; compliance, as virtue. They celebrated mandates that excluded dissenters, ignored the harm done to marginalized groups, and perpetuated an inequitable social order. The moral failure is profound: Gen Z’s actions were not simply politically naïve, but actively complicit, accepting and participating in coercion that undermined core democratic and liberal principles.

The pandemic revealed that rhetoric about freedom can coexist comfortably with the enforcement of tyranny, so long as that tyranny is framed as moral and necessary. Gen Z’s high compliance with mandates —especially taking a drug they did not need, with inherently more risk than benefit— illustrates the broader danger of a generation socialized to value safety and obedience over independent moral judgment, normalizing authoritarian behavior under the guise of collective welfare.

The New Censors and the Fragile Mind

If democracy depends on free inquiry, then the gravest threat to it today is not state censorship but the citizen who enforces ideological conformity. The new authoritarian is not a bureaucrat behind a desk — it is the student, the peer, the coworker, the activist who polices thought in the name of emotional safety. Among Gen Z, censorship is not an imposition; it is a social norm, internalized and moralized as virtue.

Survey data make this shift impossible to ignore. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) found that nearly half of college students believe it is acceptable to shout down speakers they disagree with, and one in five believe that violence can be justified to silence “offensive” speech. The same data show that a clear majority of students — 63% — are afraid to express unpopular opinions on campus for fear of social or professional reprisal. These are not outliers; they are cultural indicators. What previous generations would have recognized as intolerance is now repackaged as justice.

This is further compounded by the tendency of students to overstate their “progressive” beliefs, “pretending to hold more progressive views than [they] truly endorse to succeed socially or academically”. Revealing both the pressure to conform to ideological norms and the perpetuation of a morally cowardly majority. The instinct toward suppression extends beyond performance; it becomes a mechanism for moral signaling and social control.

This self-censorship reinforces the ideology and exposes the moral cowardice underlying conformity. The same instincts that prevent students from expressing dissenting views in daily life extend into the political realm. A citizenry unwilling to challenge peers or social norms also hesitates to sanction anti-democratic behavior by those in power. Frederiksen (2023) demonstrated across nineteen democracies that young people are significantly less likely than older generations to punish politicians who act against democratic principles. Failing to hold leaders accountable signals a collapse of civic immune response; freedom requires citizens capable of restraining power, not enabling it.

When asked, large majorities of Gen Z students report that universities should restrict speech that could be “harmful” or “offensive,” an elastic category that expands with every new orthodoxy. Heterodox Academy’s surveys show a marked generational decline in support for viewpoint diversity, with younger cohorts ranking “inclusivity” and “emotional safety” above free inquiry. Liberalism, in this schema, is conditional —permitted only when it flatters the prevailing sensibility.

The tragedy is not that these young people oppose free speech, but that they believe themselves to be defending it. They mistake censorship for compassion, ideological conformity for moral clarity, and the suppression of debate for “progress”. What emerges is a generation emotionally unfit for self-government: citizens trained to moralize fragility and punish difference, to equate dissent with harm, and to see power not as something to restrain, but as something to wield against the unorthodox.

These behaviors reflect anti-democratic tendencies and a willingness to normalize coercion in everyday life. Liberty is conditional: it exists only when approved by the cultural majority. The Founders assumed citizens could tolerate disagreement; this generation seeks to erase it. What emerges is a citizenry trained to suppress debate and enforce conformity — exercising the mechanics of authoritarianism socially and culturally, while still claiming to uphold democracy rhetorically.

What Made Them This Way

The patterns we observe in Gen Z —the tolerance for coercion, the appetite for censorious enforcement, the eagerness to substitute executive fiat for deliberative politics— did not arise mysteriously. They are the predictable product of converging forces that, together, have reshaped a generation’s habits of mind. Below I develop five mechanisms —each supported by empirical findings and then explained with historical, philosophical, and sociological reasoning.

1) The collapse of classical liberal education: ignorance as vulnerability

Recent national studies of youth attitudes show large minorities of Gen Z reporting weak attachment to constitutional norms and a worrying openness to leaders “setting aside democratic principles.” A 2025 report from More in Common found that 47% of Gen Z respondents agree that “sometimes it’s okay for leaders to set aside democratic principles (e.g., constitutional checks and balances) to fix the economy,” and only 42% of Gen Z Americans said democracy is “definitely the best” form of government. The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE, Tufts University, 2025) similarly documents that many young people fall into profiles characterized by pragmatic impatience with process and lower constitutional literacy.

Why this matters: classical liberal education —the study of Locke, Montesquieu, Madison; the practice of rhetorical disputation; training in constitutional tradeoffs— does two things. First, it supplies the conceptual vocabulary to recognize tradeoffs between freedom and equality and the reasons those tradeoffs exist. Second, it cultivates the habit of institutional prudence: the disposition to favor procedures that slow, test, and reshape policy instead of immediate outcomes. When curricula shift from argument and civic structure toward moralizing narratives and grievance instruction, students lose both the tools and the reflexes needed to recognize when noble ends are being pursued by illiberal means.

Historically, generations that have lacked formation in liberal arts and constitutional thought —think certain early 20th-century European cohorts — were more susceptible to charismatic promises of decisive action. The difference today is that the repertoire of rhetoric is “progressive”-sounding; the mechanism (procedural ignorance) is the same.

If you do not learn the grammar of democratic liberalism and republican liberty, you will judge institutions by whether they feel morally righteous, not by whether they protect citizens and liberal ideals. That creates a moral calculus in which checks, slow processes, and mediation become obstacles rather than safeguards.

2) Parenting that removed risk and cultivated dependence

A growing body of developmental research links “helicopter”, “gentle” and overinvolved parenting to lower autonomy, reduced problem-solving confidence, and greater anxiety among emerging adults. Longitudinal and profile studies (Padilla-Walker et al.; LeBlanc et al., 2019–2022) show that overinvolvement correlates with lower psychological autonomy and poorer resilience in real-world problem solving.

Why this matters: Liberal self-government presumes citizens who can deliberate, take risks, endure disagreement, and tolerate uncertainty. A parenting culture that shields children from failure —micromanaging schoolwork, mediating conflicts, intervening in social slights— produces adults who expect authority to manage their moral environment. The result is not merely fragility; it is a political psychology that equates governance with guardianship. If your default life-experience is being managed, you naturally prefer managerial solutions to political problems.

Sociologically speaking, obedience flows from learned dependency. Where previous generations learned to tolerate discomfort as the price of agency, many young people have been socialized to demand that institutions remove discomfort for them. That conditioning maps directly onto political preferences for mandates, administrative fixes, and executive discretion.

From a historical view, compare post-war civic cultivation —where rites of passage, neighborhood autonomy, and youth responsibility were common— with the last three decades’ rise in parental intervention. The social ecology required for liberal citizenship has been eroded.

3) Platform algorithms and the economics of outrage — social media as conditioning machine

Social-media dynamics amplify novelty and emotion; large-scale analyses find that false and novel political content travels farther and faster than accurate information (Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, MIT, 2018). More recent syntheses show algorithmic reinforcement, social contagion, and moral signaling combine to make ideological conformity profitable and visible.

Why this matters: Platforms reward clear, emotionally charged signals and punish nuance. Young people’s social worlds are mediated by architectures that surface moral certainties and hide context. When the economics of attention favors outrage, the cultural norms surrounding persuasion degrade into ritualized shaming and performative purity tests. Political persuasion — which requires listening, changing mind, and tolerating disagreement — is replaced by signaling conformity to a networked moral frontier.

Put simply, algorithms create micro-publics where dissent is costly; repeated exposure to curated moral consensus trains users to expect social enforcement rather than argument. The social reward structure becomes indistinguishable from coercion.

4) The moralization of risk — pandemic as catalyst

During and after COVID-19, public opinion data showed strong generational differences in attitudes toward public-health mandates and the role of state authority. Studies and polls charted higher willingness among many younger adults to accept restrictive policies in the name of safety; peer-reviewed work on support for mandates links perceived risk, trust in science, and political worldviews to higher mandate acceptance (for instance, JCOM study on support for mandatory vaccination, 2023). The COVID era also coincided with extraordinary corporate profitability and wealth concentration (Federal Reserve and Bureau of Economic Analysis data, as well as Oxfam reports on billionaire wealth gains), demonstrating a material transfer upward during the crisis even as public controls intensified.

Why this matters: The pandemic created a moral frame in which safety trumped ordinary civil liberties. For a generation whose civic reflexes already prioritized protection and who lacked deep formation in civil restraint, the calculus was simple: if coercive policy seems to save lives, it is morally required. The civic virtue of tolerating risk was replaced by a duty to impose safety. Because enforcement is simpler than persuasion, and because corporate-state alignments made compliance ubiquitous, COVID policies normalized centralized commands as the appropriate response to complex social problems.

When risk is moralized, the liberal argument about rights and tradeoffs is displaced by a utilitarian-sounding absolutism: any cost to liberal ideals is justified so long as it is purported to reduce harm; and even long after such claims are debumked or even contradicted entirely —as in, cause immense harm. Without credit given to the non-instrumental moral value of freedom, the valve of liberalism is shut.

5) Erosion of institutional trust and the paradox of delegated authority

Multiple polls and trend analyses document historically low trust in national institutions (Pew Research Center, 2024–2025; Gallup analyses). Young cohorts report especially low trust in national media, Congress, and elites, while trusting their peers and local action more (Gallup youth trust findings; CIRCLE youth trust research). Simultaneously, More in Common and other studies show a willingness among substantial fractions of youth to accept leaders overriding norms in service of practical aims.

Why this matters: Distrust of institutions does not automatically produce libertarianism. Often it produces a paradoxical preference for different authorities —experts, activists, platform gatekeepers, or executive managers — who promise decisive results. Young people may distrust Congress or legacy media yet place faith in technocratic solutions, bureaucratic experts, or crowdsourced enforcement. That substitution replaces self-governing reason with delegated sovereignty to administrative or networked power, which is precisely the structural move that concentrates authority and blunts democratic accountability.

In times of perceived institutional failure, publics either radicalize (reject all authority) or re-delegate (seek new, stronger authority). Much of Gen Z appears to be re-delegating —trading old institutions for newer forms of centralized control or for social-media-enabled moral enforcement.

How these mechanisms interact

Each mechanism is damaging on its own; together they create a reinforcing feedback loop:

• Weak civic formation leaves youth intellectually unarmed against simple moral narratives.

• Overprotective upbringing trains them to prefer managed outcomes.

• Platform dynamics reward moral certainty and punish nuance.

• Crisis moralization (pandemic) provides the perfect moral justification for coercion.

• Institutional distrust channels habit into new forms of delegated authority.

The result is not simply a set of isolated errors. It is a generational architecture of impulse —calibrated to prefer quick moral fixes over constitutional prudence, managerial fiat over deliberative politics, and social enforcement over persuasive debate. That architecture explains why Gen Z often treats the Electoral College as an “obstacle” rather than a stabilizing mechanism: the cohort’s civic instincts reward immediacy and percieved moral clarity, while constitutional form favors mediation and tradeoffs.

The Path from Freedom to Popular Tyranny

Gen Z did not set out to destroy democracy. Yet by embracing coercion, censorship, and centralized authority, they display authoritarian, anti-democratic, and pro-fascist patterns at a group level. They speak of liberty while practicing obedience; they demand safety while eroding freedom.

This is not an abstract or inconsequential issue; Gen Z is the upcoming voter cohort of most consequence. Their attitudes and behaviors will shape elections, policy, and civic norms for decades. The impulses we observe today, to prioritize immediate and percieved moral clarity over constitutional prudence, to enforce conformity socially and politically, to accept coercion in the name of safety, are poised to become dominant features of the American political landscape.

The survival of liberal democracy depends on immediate and serious restoration of classical education, cultivation of independence, and teaching that liberalism requires responsibility, deliberation, and tolerance. Without these interventions, democracy risks decaying into a system where compliance replaces conscience, conformity replaces judgment, and rhetoric…replaces liberty and justice for all.

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Modern progressivism regressivism has mastered the art of moral branding. Behind its parade of noble-sounding titles and compassionate slogans lies a politics built on performance. Where words replace results, and virtue is measured by language, not outcomes.

Examples*

Green New Deal: not green. Negligible reduction and bankrupts the globe.
Affordable Care Act: not affordable and penalized people who can’t afford to have a plan.
Black Lives Matter (BLM): protests in their name destroyed black businesses and communities, and the proceeds were embezzled.
Life-Saving Care: negligible effects on reducing suicide, and other services that fall under this umbrella often have iatrogenic effects.
Inflation Reduction Act: doesn’t reduce inflation; funnels spending into pet projects and corporate subsidies under a green label.
Build Back Better: builds nothing and makes things worse; a slogan without substance that masked trillions in debt.
Net Zero by 2050: impossible by its own math; cripples energy reliability while outsourcing emissions to other countries.
Gender-Affirming Care: affirms ideology, not biology; long-term outcomes remain poor, often causing irreversible harm.
Defund the Police: crime skyrocketed where enacted; wealthier neighborhoods quietly kept their own police.
Equity Programs: enforce equal outcomes, not equal opportunity; reward identity over merit.
For the People Act: consolidates federal control over elections—“for the people” meaning for the bureaucrats.
Respect for Marriage Act: disrespects traditional marriage by redefining it entirely.
Fair Housing Act: inflated housing prices and red tape; made housing less attainable for working-class families.
Patriot Act: one of the most unpatriotic laws ever passed; legalized mass surveillance of citizens.
No Child Left Behind: left millions behind; standardized testing hollowed out real education.
Voting Rights Advancement Act: more about securing votes than securing rights.
Safer Communities Act: targets law-abiding citizens with more regulations while ignoring the causes of violence.
American Rescue Plan: didn’t rescue America; triggered inflation and dependence.
Human Rights Campaign: prioritizes certain groups’ politics over universal human rights.

*Not all are strictly Progressive Regressive examples, though all are “progressive” impulses. All examples I could find, regardless of ideology, are here in fairness. To demonstrate my universal disdain for the abuse of headlines and titles as a form of manipulating support.

Discussion

Progressives Regressives operate almost entirely in the realm of language. They build their moral identity around headlines, titles, hashtags, and slogans — and once the right words are in place, the work is, in their minds, already done. Whether the policy, bill, or movement achieves its stated purpose is irrelevant. The claim is the accomplishment. They’ve come to believe that saying the right words is equivalent to doing the right thing.

This is why every initiative they champion sounds noble and urgent — the “Green New Deal,” “Affordable Care Act,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Life-Saving Care,” and so on. The names are moral fortresses. They are designed to be unassailable. Who could be against something green, affordable, just, or life-saving? The language itself is a trap — to question it is to declare yourself heartless or hateful. But beneath the headline, the substance often contradicts the promise. Results are irrelevant; emotion is everything.

They fixate on optics, not outcomes. What matters is not whether emissions go down, healthcare becomes affordable, or communities actually thrive — what matters is that they said the right thing, voted for the right bill, and aligned themselves with the right cause. Their politics is performative compassion — moral theater, staged for likes and self-validation. It’s activism through branding.

This obsession with words over results is deeply rooted in the modern progressive regressive psyche. Many genuinely believe that language creates reality — that by renaming, reframing, and redefining, they can reshape the world itself. If you change the words, you’ve changed the truth. “Man” and “woman” become “identities.” “Criminals” become “victims of circumstance.” “Failure” becomes “equity.” It’s linguistic alchemy, a worldview inherited from postmodern thought that treats meaning as fluid and truth as oppressive.

The problem, of course, is that reality doesn’t bend to rhetoric. You can call something “life-saving,” but if it harms, it harms. You can call something “affordable,” but if it drives prices up, it’s not. You can chant that “black lives matter,” but if your movement devastates black neighborhoods and enriches its founders, then the slogan has become a mask for hypocrisy. They cling to words precisely because outcomes are harder to defend.

The power of labeling has become the entire strategy. Once something has the “right” name, scrutiny is unnecessary and even forbidden. Journalists repeat the headline, the public absorbs the tone, and few ever dig into the data or results. The moral posturing becomes self-reinforcing: “We care more, we speak better, therefore we are right.” Progressives Regressives have become the political class of wordsmiths without workmanship.

There’s also a deeper emotional appeal here. The names, the slogans — they offer people the illusion of participation and virtue without the discomfort of results or responsibility. Supporting a “Green New Deal” or “Equity Initiative” feels like doing good; it signals empathy and intelligence. The language provides the moral high ground cheaply, with no demand for proof. It’s politics for people who want to feel righteous, not effective.

So when the programs inevitably fail — when the cities get poorer, the energy bills rise, the crime spikes, the debt balloons — they don’t reflect, they rename. The new slogan rolls out, the same cycle begins, and the same people congratulate themselves on being “on the right side of history.” They are so addicted to the feeling of “progress” that they’ve stopped caring about progress itself.

That’s the essence of it: progressivism regressivism, as it’s now practiced, is a language game. It’s not about changing the world for the better, but about curating a narrative where one always appears to be doing so. They live and govern by headline. The results are somebody else’s problem —usually, the taxpayer’s and the very people they claim to care about.

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While we wrestle with what Jung referred to as Puer aeternus and what moderns might recognise as “Peter Pan syndrome” at what seems to be an epidemic scale we must reflect upon how this came to be.

With a mere cursory glance into dating culture reflections online, one will see either explicit and conscious accusations of dating-age men acting like perpetual boys and women’s complaints that they feel they are mothers to the men they date and even marry. We also see complaints of having to tolerate or manage behaviours of men that, if one were to pull the thread, also lead to the failure to have developed into manhood.

And though many of these complaints tend towards the histrionic, or even stem from the woman’s own failures in personal accountability, there is a reckoning which needs to be addressed at scale.

These same women, individually, and women in Western Societies as a whole, have spent the last 50 years curating this precise outcome.

Indirectly, via the Ismene Effect (or The Great Feminisation), Hyper-maternal and pathological parenting styles (e.g., prioritising “Self-esteem”, helicopter and gentle parenting), the shaming of fathers into the submission of Shadow Fatherdom, to more directly undermining men’s development via critiques of rites of passage, male-only spaces/organizations, demonization of hunting/butchering ones own food, anti-bullying/anti-hazing campaigns, or any other masculine essential that has been demolished under the banner of being “cruel”, “unfair”, “archaic”, and the lot of other ignorantly gynocentric accusations.

The resulting outcome, for which men and women alike hold so much disdain and resentment, will not cease until we change the equation. Not until we reestablish Rites and Rituals, along with the expectations and roles that burdened boys into men, and in doing so reestablish the boundaries between the sexes that nature has mandated, can we reconcile this cultural illness.

The lens provided us by the “Female Happiness Paradox” demonstrates that we have no business in continuing this social engineering project which has done nothing more than make the sexes adversaries instead of the historically collaborative partners we evolved to be.

We can bring back what we lost while maintaining the boundary between the descriptive and prescriptive. The problem wasn’t Sex Roles, it was the rigidity of our descriptive that turned normative behaviour into expectations and mandates. The “Gender” Equality Paradox has revealed that removing the prescriptive, and giving everyone the freedom to choose, leads right back to the “traditional” Sex Roles that propelled humanity for millennia. Let the exceptions be exceptions, and everyone else find their natural place in the normative structures.

And it all starts with bringing back a shared metaphysics, rituals, and most certainly, rites of passage. That is what I sought to accomplish in my previous post (linked below) and is bolstered by this piece by (below).

Concepts Mentioned:

“Gender” Equality Paradox:

The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

Decoding the Gender-Equality Paradox

One of the most surprising discoveries of the last few decades is known as the gender-equality paradox. This refers to the fact that, for a large number of traits, sex differences are larger, rather than smaller, in more gender-equal nations. The finding is surprising because it seems entirely plausible that, in cultures where men and women are treated differently and play different roles in society, sex differences will tend to be magnified. Even if there’s an innate contribution to many sex differences, this seems like a reasonable expectation. But the reasonable expectation turns out to be wrong. In fact, it’s not just wrong; it has things back-to-front, at least for some traits…

Read more

3 years ago · 38 likes · 26 comments · Steve Stewart-Williams

Academy of Ideas

Why Boys Must Suffer to Become Men

“Among the Magwanda and Bapedi peoples of Africa, the master of the initiation addresses the [boys to be initiated] in these words: “Until now, you have been in the darkness of childhood; you were like women and you knew nothing…

Listen now

10 months ago · 14 likes · Academy of Ideas

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Modern criticism of Christopher Columbus is largely unfounded and rooted in present-day moral frameworks that distort historical reality. Columbus was not a genocidal maniac or uniquely cruel figure —he was a man of his time, driven by commerce, exploration, and religion, all standard motivations in the 15th century. His intent remained consistent: to establish trade routes and relationships with tribes willing to engage. He didn’t arrive with an agenda of mass violence or enslavement. The only way to condemn Columbus with modern moral outrage is to fully embrace presentism —the dangerous and intellectually lazy practice of projecting today’s values, knowledge, and moral standards onto people who lived in a fundamentally different world. Judging historical figures by ethical frameworks that didn’t exist in their time not only distorts the truth but also erases the complexity of human history. Without this flawed lens, Columbus’s actions —and the consequences of his voyages— become far more understandable, rooted in the realities of his era rather than the fantasies of ours.

Contemporary attacks on Columbus are not based on sound historical reasoning —they are products of ideological fashion, emotional revisionism, and a profound failure to understand both historical context and human nature. For one, Columbus does not meet the criteria for genocide. That accusation hinges on a willful misreading of history, especially the tragic population collapse of native peoples in the Americas —a catastrophe caused not by policy or intent, but by disease and misunderstanding.

There wasn’t a campaign of extermination; it was the biological consequence of first contact between continents. The tragic loss of Native life that followed was due overwhelmingly to disease —the result of biological exposure, not malice or policy. Germ theory didn’t exist; no one understood how disease spread or how to prevent it. Some pandemics even preceded direct contact, spreading through trade and animals. Germs/diseases travel so swiftly and beyond human intervention (we should all understand this by now) that there are well-documented cases of entire villages dying out without ever encountering a European. To hold Columbus morally accountable for this is not only historically incorrect, it’s intellectually dishonest.

Columbus is frequently accused of genocide and cruelty. But these charges ignore the actual mechanism behind the devastating collapse of native populations: disease. Smallpox, influenza, measles —these Old World pathogens wiped out up to 90% of the native population. Not war. Not policy. Not prejudice. But because of invisible, unstoppable biological contact.

Here’s what’s crucial and almost always overlooked:

Without germ theory, peaceful contact was impossible.
There was no conceivable version of history where native peoples and Europeans could have interacted civilly without conflict —because the unexplained death that followed contact inevitably bred superstition, fear, and hostility.

The psychological and social consequences were inevitable. Imagine this: You welcome foreigners into your village. Days later, your friends and family begin dying inexplicably. You don’t have a microscope, a pathogen theory, or a concept of immunity —you have curses, spirits, and omens. What happens next is not going to be diplomacy. It’s war.

Naturally, this led to mistrust, fear, violence, and retaliation —not because either side was particularly cruel, but because human beings do not react rationally to unexplained mass death. And Europeans, just as ignorant, often responded to Native hostility with the mirrored brutality. It wasn’t premeditated evil. It was panic, misinterpretation, and the total absence of scientific understanding. Native peoples were not passive victims but political actors who resisted in fear and strategy. Columbus responded as any leader of his time —or even our time for that matter— would: with force when diplomacy failed.

So no, it wasn’t possible for anyone, Columbus included, to avoid conflict. Germ theory didn’t just change medicine. It redefined what was even possible in human relations. Before it, peaceful coexistence across continents simply could not occur. Unless modern moralizers are suggesting that Europeans, upon realizing they had just discovered a new hemisphere, should have turned their ships around and collectively agreed to forget they had doubled the known world —which is, of course, an insane take.

As for slavery and conquest. Brutal, sure —but normal. Columbus’s actions were neither unusual nor cruel by the standards of his time —nor were they novel in the Americas, where complex societies already practiced harsh forms of control and warfare. Singling out Columbus alone ignores this broader reality and reduces history to simplistic moral judgments.

Slavery was humanity’s first great moral innovation, given the alternative modus operandi that preceded its adoption —complete and total slaughter by execution. Slavery was universally practiced across civilizations —Native and European alike — and often seen as a more humane alternative to killing enemies in war. In many cultures —including the early American colonies—, enslavement represented a life-debt , not racial degradation. Furthermore, Native peoples enslaved each other, waged wars, practiced ritual human sacrifice, and conducted brutal reprisals. Europeans, Africans, and Asians all operated within systems defined by conquest, power, and violence. Selective outrage ignores that reality and reduces complex history to modern propaganda. Columbus didn’t invent or uniquely abuse these systems and institutions; he participated in a system that was globally accepted.

Even the charges of brutality lack weight when placed in the proper context. European exploration was often met with conflict, because Natives were not helpless victims, they were people just like the newcomers —political, strategic, and sometimes hostile— reacting in fear and confusion to unfamiliar outsiders. Columbus responded accordingly. The idea that he arrived as a sadist, intent on bloodshed, is not only unsupported —it contradicts the historical record of his intent and early interactions. It’s important to remember that Columbus often advocated for Native peoples in European courts, pushing for their protection and fair treatment —a fact frequently overlooked in modern critiques.

Columbus didn’t pivot into evil halfway through his journey. He set out for trade, sought peaceful relations where they were offered, and continued to pursue commerce —the central driver of his age. His legacy is only complicated because of post hoc moral framing, designed to inject 21st-century guilt into 15th-century action. The man was consistent. The outcome was transformative. And judgment is misplaced.

Meanwhile, moderns —especially those quick to condemn Columbus— live in glass houses built on moral amnesia and myopic reasoning. We rely every day on technologies and systems that carry ethical complexities we often overlook or accept as unavoidable necessities. From the devices we use to the energy that powers our lives, many modern conveniences come with costs we don’t fully confront. While many of these same technologies also hold the promise for cleaner, more ethical futures. It’s important to recognize our complicity in ongoing exploitation and harm. We should also acknowledge that we are operating with far more knowledge and tools for change than people in Columbus’s time ever had.

To condemn historical figures without that same context is to hold them to a standard no one can fairly meet. We pollute, exploit, and destroy —not ignorantly, but knowingly— and then flatter ourselves by condemning men who lived in a world without the knowledge or tools we now take for granted. If we refuse to extend grace and understanding to historical figures like Columbus, we are implicitly demanding a perfect morality we ourselves will never meet. The judgment we cast backward today will be the judgment cast upon us in centuries to come. We label Columbus a villain to comfort ourselves —to create the illusion that we, unlike him, would have known better. While actively and unabashedly contradicting that notion on a daily basis. But history doesn’t care about our self-image. It demands honesty.

Columbus was a man of his time, with consistent intent, operating under normal conditions for his era, who made a world-changing expedition —without some secret agenda of mass cruelty or conquest. He didn’t commit genocide, he didn’t deviate from his purpose of commerce in favor of sadistic ends, and he didn’t invent the ills he’s accused of. What he did do was change the course of human history. Undeniably —and, ultimately, for the better.

Columbus opened the door to global interconnectedness. His voyage triggered the Columbian Exchange, arguably the most significant ecological and cultural transformation in human history. Crops like maize, potatoes, and tomatoes revolutionized diets and economies worldwide, while horses, cattle, and written language transformed life across the Americas. Ideas, technologies, and trade began circulating on a scale never before seen. His expedition laid the foundation of the modern world.

Let’s stop pretending that we’re more moral than the past just because we inherited its outcomes. The mirror of history reflects back more than we like to admit.

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I. Stuck in a Bygone Era

Modern parents are trapped in a nostalgic illusion. They defend public schooling as if it still resembles the world they once knew. But the school of the 1980s or 1990s is gone. Even if that earlier system was ideal (which it often wasn’t), today’s schools are fundamentally different. Nostalgia blinds parents to the reality: the system they defend is no longer the system they remember.

Most parents assume that sending their children to school is inherently safe and nurturing —that the adults responsible will care for their children as they themselves would. In reality, they are handing their child over to strangers for the majority of each day, often in environments that prioritize obedience, schedules, and bureaucracy over individual care.

Nothing says “I love you” like handing your child to a stranger for eight hours a day. That is the quiet truth beneath the institution of schooling —a system built on delegation, not devotion. Modern schools were literally designed to produce factory worker drones: classrooms regimented like assembly lines, bells dictating movement, standardized tests as quality control, and curricula stripped of creativity. Horace Mann, John Dewey, and early 20th-century reformers explicitly drew from Prussian education models to create citizens who obeyed orders, followed schedules, and learned to accept authority unquestioningly.

The modern school isn’t a community of learning; it’s a custodial holding pen designed for compliance. Children are treated as a labor force in waiting — scheduled, tested, and medicated into obedience.

Most parents defend public education out of nostalgia, not knowledge. They picture the school they once attended —orderly classrooms, trusted teachers, and a sense of shared civic purpose. But that world no longer exists. Parents cling to the illusion that their child’s experience mirrors their own —that school is still a place to “learn the basics” and “make friends.” It isn’t.

Even the basics are gone. The reading, writing, and arithmetic that built literate citizens have been displaced by identity lessons, “emotional check-ins,” and “digital literacy” units with no literacy at all. The very metrics of learning have been quietly redefined: mastery replaced by “competency,” grading replaced by “growth,” knowledge replaced by “skills.”

The average parent is defending a corpse —embalmed in memory, rotting in reality.

The tragedy isn’t that public schools are failing. It’s that they are succeeding at creating the exact kind of docile, dependent, and demoralized citizen they were built to produce. Parents who imagine they’re offering their children opportunity are, in truth, offering them up to a bureaucracy that neither loves nor even knows them.

II. The Illiteracy of the “Educated”

The numbers are devastating. Roughly 40% of American students are functionally illiterate by the time they graduate high school. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading scores have declined to their lowest level in three decades — despite per-pupil spending having tripled in real dollars since the 1970s.

This isn’t a financial problem. The United States spends more per student than almost any other developed nation, yet consistently ranks near the bottom in reading, math, and science among OECD countries. The correlation between spending and outcomes is now almost inverse.

Why? Because the system abandoned what works. The shift from phonics (sound-based decoding) to whole-language and “balanced literacy” methods gutted reading comprehension nationwide. Even the New York Times and The Atlantic now concede what cognitive scientists have known for decades: children must be explicitly taught to decode phonemes, not merely guess words from context.

Teachers’ unions and education colleges vehemently ignored the data for fifty years. They turned reading instruction into a political statement —elevating theory over evidence and ideology over children. The result is a generation of students who can navigate iPads but not sentences.

And when they fail, the system never blames itself. It blames poverty, racism, or “learning differences.” Anything but the fact that it taught them wrong.

The great irony of American schooling is that it produces the one thing it was built to eradicate: ignorance.

And the illiteracy doesn’t end in K-12.

58% of students understood very little of the passages they read

38% could understand about half of the sentences

5% could understand all seven paragraphs

These are college students majoring in English. About half of them are English Education majors, which means they will be teaching books like Bleak House to high school students after graduating. But they themselves cannot understand the literal meaning of the sentences in the opening paragraphs…

…Again, these students had full use of dictionaries and even their phones when reading the passages. They were free to look up and search any terms they didn’t recognize. But these resources did not help them understand the text…Almost all of them went on to be awarded BAs in English.

Read more here

III. Childhood Without Play

Schools have abolished free play —not by accident through actual policy. Recess time in many districts has been shortened or eliminated altogether in favor of test prep and “structured activities.” According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, U.S. children have lost more than 8 hours a week of free play over the past three decades. Unsupervised play —the engine of imagination, negotiation, and emotional resilience— has been replaced with “guided social learning,” where adults script every moment and monitor every dispute.

This sterilized environment doesn’t prevent harm; it prevents maturity. When children can’t roughhouse, climb, build, explore, or risk failure, they don’t develop the self-regulation and confidence that actual play builds. We now raise kids who can articulate feelings in five colors of crayon but panic when unsupervised for ten minutes.

Free play also used to be multi-age play. Older kids led, younger kids learned —the most natural apprenticeship in human history. The six-year-old who learned to negotiate with a ten-year-old was building social fluency far beyond anything a “peer conflict resolution workshop” could teach. By segregating children strictly by age, schools destroy both mentorship and humility. The natural order of learning has been replaced with bureaucratic sameness.

IV. Health Consequences of Modern Schooling

Children in traditional schools spend most of their day indoors under fluorescent lighting, seated at desks that restrict movement, with minimal exercise and little exposure to sunlight. Low vitamin D, poor posture, and sedentary behavior are now pervasive, contributing to long-term musculoskeletal and immune deficits. Overly sterile classrooms, combined with minimal outdoor exposure, correlate with rising allergies, asthma, and immune disorders (Hanscom, Balanced and Barefoot).

Angela Hanscom emphasizes that movement and sensory-rich environments are critical for healthy development. When children are deprived of climbing, running, balancing, and exploring natural environments, their vestibular and proprioceptive systems, spatial reasoning, and motor coordination fail to develop optimally. Exposure to varied terrain, natural sounds, textures, and even barefoot play (“grounding”) enhances attention, problem-solving, emotional regulation, and risk assessment —all systematically stripped from modern school settings.

In short, physical and environmental neglect in modern schooling produces cascading consequences:

• compromised vestibular and proprioceptive development

• Obesity

• impaired spatial reasoning and coordination

• increased anxiety and emotional dysregulation

• immune system deficits

• reduced resilience and confidence

Traditional schooling is not only academically and emotionally harmful —it is physically injurious1, systematically undermining the foundational building blocks of healthy childhood.

V. Pathologizing Normal Childhood

The school system has become a diagnostic pipeline. Ordinary traits once recognized as developmental stages —restlessness, daydreaming, contrarian streaks— are now considered symptoms.

ADHD diagnoses have more than doubled since the 1990s, with boys vastly overrepresented.

Anxiety and depression rates among adolescents have also exploded, coinciding almost perfectly with the rise of school-based “mental health” programs and constant emotional surveillance —as well as smartphones and social media, which most schools allow access to throughout the day.

Abigail Shrier, in Bad Therapy, captures this perfectly. She observes that trauma-informed schooling, while well-intentioned, medicalizes normal variance, encouraging children to define themselves as fragile or damaged. Ordinary childhood experiences are reframed as evidence of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) or trauma, even when none exist.

Shrier highlights the tension between action vs. state orientation: children are instructed to report, monitor, and reflect rather than act and problem-solve. This diminishes locus of control, turning students into passive reactors rather than autonomous agents.

Shrier also critiques Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and self-esteem theory. Programs that prioritize constant “check-ins,” emotional validation, or inflated self-concepts over mastery produce fragile, anxious children. SEL replaces real-world problem-solving with subjective emotional management; children are trained to monitor and interpret their own feelings as signals of trauma or failure. Self-esteem initiatives, meanwhile, reward compliance and participation over competence, teaching children to expect affirmation without effort.

Drawing on Peter Gray, Shrier notes that constant adult supervision and “monitoring for trauma” increases anxiety and reduces resilience. When every behavior is scrutinized for pathology, children internalize fragility as identity, seeing themselves as victims in need of intervention rather than capable actors. Teachers, not trained clinicians, are cast as therapists — turning ordinary classrooms into laboratories of over-caution and infantilization.

The result: children who once learned resilience through experience are now trained in hyper-vigilance, dependency on external validation, and self-doubt.

More from Peter Gray:

VI. Teachers as Therapists

The teacher’s role has shifted from instructor to therapist-proxy. Classrooms are festooned with “feelings charts,” mindfulness corners, and emotional check-ins. SEL — Social Emotional Learning — consumes hours once reserved for reading or arithmetic. Teachers now track “emotional competencies” with the same seriousness that once went to math and facts.

The absurdity is self-reinforcing: academics decline, so schools double down on therapy to manage the demoralization they themselves created.

VII. The Feminization of Education

Modern schooling is the institutional embodiment of what Helen Andrews calls “The Great Feminization”2, which parallels what I have coined “The Ismene Effect”. Risk, competition, and independence have been replaced by consensus, emotional validation, and performative empathy. Boys in particular are penalized for behaving like boys: energy becomes “hyperactivity,” assertiveness becomes “aggression,” competitiveness becomes “toxicity.”

Controlled studies confirm the bias. When grades are based on subjective assessment, boys consistently score lower than girls, only to find identical standardized test results. Importantly, this asymmetry is largely driven by female teachers —male teachers grade boys and girls roughly symmetrically (Cornwell et al., 2013; Lavy & Sand, 2018). In other words, boys’ underperformance in classroom grades is not due to ability but to covert evaluation bias, and the predominance of female teachers in U.S. schools (~75–80%, rising to >90% in early grades) amplifies this effect.

Grades now reward agreeableness over aptitude. A compliant girl who colors neatly will outperform a curious boy who challenges instruction —even if he grasps the material better. Over time, this produces two casualties: the stifled male and the overanxious female, both conditioned to see authority as the measure of their worth.

But the impact doesn’t stop at K–12. Once institutions are disproportionately female in composition, the goals, incentives, and culture shift. Research and historical analysis show that as sex ratios tilt, organizations prioritize social harmony, emotional signaling, and harm reduction over scientific inquiry, performance, or innovation. Risk-taking is discouraged, dissent is penalized, and empirical rigour is degraded or destroyed in the subordination of egalitarian impulses, consensus-seeking, and emotional comfort. K–12 education is simply the earliest and most visible site of this broader institutional transformation, where intellectual ambition and scientific endeavour are actively reduced in favor of emotional compliance.

VIII. The “You Can’t Teach Without a Degree” Myth

One of the most persistent justifications for compulsory public schooling is that parents lack formal training: “You can’t teach; you don’t have a teaching degree.” It sounds authoritative, but in light of reality, it’s absurd.

Teaching, particularly in public schools, attracts a disproportionate share of the lowest academic performers. Education majors consistently score in the lowest quartile on SAT and ACT exams, and their college GPAs are often inflated relative to other majors. Studies from the Brookings Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research confirm that teacher-prep programs recruit disproportionately from the bottom third of college applicants.

This isn’t just a moral critique; it’s an institutional fact. The highest-performing minds avoid education because it offers low prestige, low pay, and rising ideological conformity. What remains is a profession populated by bureaucrats enforcing standardized curricula rather than intellectuals transmitting and cultivating knowledge.

The irony is staggering: the very people who argue that you must have a teaching credential to educate are often themselves underqualified in the subject matter they teach. Parents who homeschool, guided by evidence-based methods, subject mastery, and individualized pacing, routinely produce students who outperform their public-school peers on standardized tests and in university admissions.

The system attempts to mask this inadequacy with slogans:

• “Every child learns differently,”

• “We teach the whole child,”

• “Social-emotional growth over academics.”

Translation: mastery is optional, and genuine scholarship is sidelined. Meanwhile, parents without formal certification regularly achieve what professional educators fail to deliver: literate, independent, and capable students.

Homeschooling isn’t just viable; it’s often superior, and the credentialist arguments used to discredit it are, at best, ironic and, at worst, a convenient cover for systemic failure.

IX. The Socialization Myth

Critics still trot out the “socialization” canard —that homeschoolers grow up awkward or sheltered. That myth is 30 years out of date! It originated when early homeschoolers were intentionally isolationist, often motivated by strict religious separation. But modern homeschooling bears little resemblance to that caricature.

Today’s homeschool families form co-ops, pod schools, and hybrid academies; their children join sports teams, debate clubs, scouting groups, and volunteer organizations. They interact with multiple age groups, not just a lockstep cohort. In other words: they experience real socialization — the kind grounded in competence, cooperation, and diversity of age and interest, not the artificial micro-society of thirty same-aged kids forced to sit still for six hours.

Research and reports from universities and professional employers confirm these observations: homeschool graduates tend to be more engaged, more self-directed, and more willing to take initiative. They are more likely to start clubs, lead projects, volunteer in community programs, and participate meaningfully in organizational settings. Social development in homeschooling emphasizes responsibility, collaboration, and problem-solving across ages and contexts — skills that conventional schools often neglect under rigid age cohorts and scripted group work.

X. Homeschoolers Outperform

Every major study of homeschool outcomes finds that they outscore public-school students by 15–30 percentile points on standardized tests.

They read more, write more, and retain knowledge better.

Colleges increasingly seek them out for their independence and initiative. Admissions officers describe them as self-directed learners —able to manage workloads without the hand-holding that public education now assumes necessary.

Employers echo the same: homeschool graduates tend to adapt faster, need less supervision, and take responsibility for outcomes.

The only domain where homeschoolers sometimes lag is STEM, largely because lab-based experiences are harder to replicate. But this gap is closing rapidly thanks to Khan Academy, Brilliant, MIT OpenCourseWare, Outschool, and hybrid co-ops offering physical lab rotations. The infrastructure now exists for homeschoolers not just to match but surpass the traditional system in science and math.

Homeschooling also provides the flexibility to cultivate a child’s individual passions and intellectual interests. Freed from a rigid, one-size-fits-all curriculum, children can dedicate time to shadowing professionals, volunteering in meaningful roles, apprenticing in trades, or even interning in fields they may want to pursue. This early exposure —often by age 10-12— to real-world work and responsibility allows them to hone skills, clarify interests, and align career goals with lived experience—something impossible when the majority of the day is consumed by a cookie-cutter institutional schedule. By integrating learning with authentic practice, homeschoolers develop not only knowledge but also practical judgment and professional intuition long before peers trapped in traditional classrooms begin to explore these paths.

XI. “But How Can Anyone Afford to Homeschool?”

The better question is: how can you afford not to?
School is sold as a public service, but in practice it’s a logistical and financial parasite —an institution that hijacks not just your child’s time, but your entire family’s rhythm.

The average parent structures their entire day around the school’s demands: waking early, rushing breakfast, commuting to/waiting at bus stops or in pick-up/drop-off lines, attending meetings, managing endless fundraisers, and enforcing homework they didn’t assign. Schools call this “supportive parental involvement.” In reality, it’s a form of adult servitude to the institution. You don’t own your hours—the school does. You can’t travel at your convenience, you can’t take spontaneous family trips; you can’t even have lunch together. Your life orbits a bell schedule designed in the 19th century for factory compliance.

Homeschooling breaks those chains.
No bells. No permission slips. No PTA bureaucracy. You live by your own calendar. Families who homeschool often discover they gain time and freedom: they can travel, explore museums and historical sites without crowds, and let learning follow curiosity. Real education happens at libraries, in nature, in conversations, and on the road —not under fluorescent lights at 7:30 a.m.

Then there’s the financial illusion. The idea that “we both have to work” often collapses under simple arithmetic. In many households, the second income is effectively nullified by the combined cost of childcare, transportation, school supplies, takeout meals, and professional clothing. Parents are told they “can’t afford” one income3, but in practice they are working to pay strangers to raise, feed, and miseducate their children—while the system congratulates itself for being “accessible.” The irony is grotesque: families are stretched thin funding a system that produces functional illiteracy and dependency.

Homeschooling, by contrast, is lean and efficient.
Free platforms like Khan Academy, Crash Course, and Coursera cover nearly every subject. Libraries, used bookstores, and open educational resources supply the rest. Most museums and science centers offer discounted or even free homeschool days. Genuine cognitive work—focused, active learning—only occupies about two to three hours a day, according to research on intellectual stamina. The rest of the day belongs to life itself: outdoor play, chores, cooking, reading, and participation in the real world—the original and most effective classroom.

Homeschooling also realigns the moral economy of the family.
The parent who stays home is not “foregoing income”; they are reclaiming their children’s formation from an institution that treats them as state property. The modern dual-income model is not freedom—it’s dependence disguised as liberation. For most of human history, children learned by watching their parents live: how to solve problems, build, tend, repair, and think. That’s what civilization actually runs on. We traded that birthright for cubicles and cafeteria trays.

Homeschoolers relieve the public system of cost yet are still forced to fund it. They save the state thousands per pupil but receive no rebate, no break, no recognition. If taxation —also known as theft— were truly about proportional contribution and benefit, homeschoolers would be compensated for the load they lift from public infrastructure. Instead, they’re punished for opting out.

The truth is simple: homeschooling is not a luxury. It’s a refusal to rent your child’s mind to the lowest bidder.
It’s cheaper than school, freer than school, and truer to how humans were meant to learn. The modern education system doesn’t just fail your children—it colonizes your time, your energy, and your family’s capacity for real life. Homeschooling gives it back.

XI. Conclusion

Homeschooling is not a retreat from education — it’s a reclamation of it.

The school system as it stands is anti-academic, anti-childhood, and anti-freedom. It produces dependence and neurosis, not literacy and initiative.

The way I see it, if you wanted to design an institution that did everything not just wrong but actively opposite to what decades of research tell us promotes healthy outcomes, you would get something essentially identical to the modern education system: reading instruction reversed from decades of evidence, children monitored to the point of anxiety, free play eliminated, teachers with weak academic preparation, children medicated, pathologized, and infantilized, physical health neglected, social-emotional learning prioritized over actual literacy and reasoning.

The debate over schooling doesn’t end at curriculum or credentials —it’s about custody. Who owns your child’s time, mind, and moral formation? The modern school system answers that question unambiguously: they do.

Every hour your child spends in a desk is an hour spent absorbing someone else’s priorities. Every policy, lesson, and “check-in” serves a bureaucracy that survives by convincing parents that captivity is care. But there is nothing normal —or necessary— about surrendering your children’s waking lives to an institution that produces conformity, anxiety, and mediocrity in equal measure.

The institutions will not reform themselves. The unions will not voluntarily shrink. The bureaucrats will not admit failure. The only reform left is exit.
Either we withdraw and rebuild —or we keep funding our own decline.

If you want a better society, start by raising better people. And if you want better people, stop outsourcing their formation to a machine built to flatten them.

If you want to raise a competent, sane human being, you have one option left: teach them yourself.

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As discussions about vaccines and acetaminophen and their relationship —or lack thereof— continue to ensue over the internet. I think there needs to be some reflection and some humility.

The fact is, neither side seems to be on sufficient ground to speak with the amount of certainty that they do.

The Problem of Certainty

“The science is settled” is an absolutely anti-science statement, especially when we have this much equipoise and, frankly, as many perverse incentives as we do. It’s absurd to see organizations still trying to strong-arm the public with this type of rhetoric. Everything they used this phrase on (safe and effective, no myocarditis, no fertility issues, no neurological or clotting issues) turned out to be blatant lies —seeing as the signals and research for these predates the assertion.

The same goes for the side making claims they simply cannot yet —and may never— support. The fact that Autism diagnosis is completely inflated is a massive hurdle that likely needs to be addressed before we can even give the iatrogenic claims a proper research cycle. Until autism goes back into an objectively confined diagnosis, the correlation of autism rising with vaccine and acetaminophen usage is circumstantial.

Which brings us back to the ludicrous assertions of the detractors of a potential cause:

Stop saying autism rates are up because of better screening and diagnosis!!! It’s not better! It’s worse!

Diagnostic Inflation

The levies of the category are so grotesquely ruptured that the average American thinks autism is “no big deal” and “just makes people quirky”. This means, when people like RFK are impassioned by the tragedy of what real autistic outcomes are, that he thinks can be prevented, people fail to make the distinction between a truly autistic child who is going to be severely disabled for their entire lives and the savant they saw on sitcoms the last 20 or so years.

So, there is no certainty. Especially when half of us don’t even understand the other half’s arguments and positions.

I will say this, however:

Science should never get this defensive! Science is not “the science”. There absolutely is a lack of robust evidence, and many approaches ignore or obfuscate due to perverse incentives. Genuine, long-term prospective studies do still need to be run. Especially seeing as we have an inflated vaccination schedule and there has been no investigation into how this many vaccines interact long term, and autism is not the only adverse event potentially linked to these practices. Future investigation needs to both confirm autism is not linked, but it cannot —must not— fall for autism as a red herring and forget to evaluate the overall safety of these technologies and protocols.

For more on Diagnostic Inflation:

Psychobabble

"The Spectrum": How Autism Was Hijacked By Narcissists

When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group…

Read more

a year ago · 1843 likes · 594 comments · Hannah Spier, MD

Perverse Incentives in Research

Another fallacious argument is “look at all this research and all these scientists who specialize in the field”. Well, first of all, not all scientists are doing great work, or even adequate work; many publish just to publish and they publish what is institutionally safe —and those “handful of papers” that get dismissed are very well likely Ginger Rogers Findings. Secondly, even if they were working hard on understanding the origins and relationships between autism and certain medications, this argument remains a fallacy stacked on a fallacy (appeal to authority and bandwagon). Scientists and publications are not evidence of anything but the existence of scientists and publications. We still need to produce evidence that unequivocally demonstrates safety.

Ad Hoc Medicine

It’s important to note that vaccines have actually been brought onto the routine schedule in an ad hoc fashion with little investigation of their interactions with each other. Few if any having ever undergone placebo control trials; the “best” defense of this being a technical copout of “ethics concerns”.

The Strawman of Multifactorial Causes

Another missing piece is that many obfuscations operate on technicality as well. Both in the scientific literature and the institutional statements on vaccines. Take for instance a recent post from the American Psychological Association, by Dr. Mitch Prinstein, APA Chief of Psychology: “Research shows that autism has complex, multifactorial origins —genetic, biological, and environmental— and represents a spectrum of neurodevelopmental differences, not a single condition with a single cause”. Who’s claiming a “single cause”, and how are vaccines not “biological” or “environmental”? This is a strawman. How does autism being multifactorial rule out vaccines or other medications? Arguably, being multifactorial is an argument that favors —not detracts— vaccines and medications as potential causes.

Adverse Events and Sleight of Hand

You will see the same manipulative tactics in the scientific journals where they rhetorically remove that vaccines can be a cause. You will see vaccine induced events that many will note as adverse events that either are known or could logically be implicated as sequelae of autism. These include encephalopathy/encephalitis, febrile seizures, hypotonic-hyporesponsive episodes, autoimmune issues, or other reactions that occur at a critical stage of neurological development but get dismissed because if they occurred at any other time in our lives they are ineffectual1. Instead of recognizing the vaccine as what initiated the chain of events, they will blame the adverse event itself, naming it the cause and ignoring that the vaccine caused the reaction. Utilizing this methodological sleight of hand, they obfuscate by advantaging the indirectness of the vaccine and the resultant harm. Another way to appear scrupulous while in actuality being anything but, is they will look for a brief time (28 days to 6 months), look away in time to miss a signal and call it “safe”. The follow ups are abysmal or even effectually non-existent for the outcomes that fuel this debate.

The Acetaminophen Gap

The “evidence” for acetaminophen is even more lacking. While writing this, and needing to confirm so I don’t misdate, I investigated when acetaminophen was approved for use during pregnancy, expecting a date in the 90’s. What did I find? It has never been approved. We have merely used it for decades —well before Autism became an official diagnosis (1980 in DSM III). We simply continued its use and used lack of evidence as evidence. Recommendations are essentially artifacts from long before modern regulations and inquiries. However, as recently as 2021, observations have emerged that there could be a link between long term use and neurological disorders. Which, if I understand the scientific method correctly: calls for further investigation. Not a public reaction of “it’s just observational”. Uh huh, so let’s run the research it would take to establish causality/no causality.

Authoritarian Science

The problem with the scientific community on this issue —and others I suppose. Is their outright authoritarian approach of dismissal and finality. Both of which are wholly unscientific to the extent that they should lose the right to be regarded as scientific experts/institutions/community.

What’s more is that they capitalize on their modern disciples inability to think beyond the length of the average TikTok video. People who rely on finality so they can move to the next thing. But that’s not a scientific approach, it’s scientism (science as religion). This effect is exacerbated by the very necessity of approaching the status quo and trying to establish function.

When they see mass firings, defunding, and dismantling of institutions, they shriek “they’re killing science!”. Their TikTok brains are unable to comprehend that what has been dismantled will be rebuilt and replaced —hopefully for the better. The reality is, nobody can defend the status quo, nobody. Yet they cling to it in a Stockholm’s-esque frenzy. But even your local mechanic can tell you “You gotta take some things apart and even throw some out” to fix something. Their lack of imagination fails them and makes this harder than it has to be. Just because there is a pause or cancellation of research today, or it has been defunded, doesn’t mean the plan is to stay in a science-less world —or more science-less than whatever we call the last 30years.

What Both Sides Miss

So, here’s the thing. Neither side can make any definitive claims. The blind faith vaccine advocates cannot definitively say there is no concern until they do full, prospective, clinical research that screen for sub clinical sequelae and maintain rigorous long term follow up; as well as consider interactions between vaccines in a bloated schedule. And the vaccine detractors cannot definitively say anything until they perform the same methodological burden and control for the diagnostic creep that inflated the supposed epidemic; until they contend with the fact that there has been rampant overdiagnosis, and until both sides use the same objective measures for what is autism, any investigation is going to remain murky. I would suggest starting at the undeniable and working our way up the diagnostic chain.

A Path Forward

If we limit autism diagnosis to individuals identifiable through objective measures like severe limitations and behavioral issues, neuroimaging, and/or other biological markers, we’re more likely to capture biologically definitive cases and build a clearer understanding of core mechanisms. We can at least know we’re all talking about the same population, which would be a huge step in the right direction in and of itself. Just as important though, we may be searching for a single marker to define what is actually a cluster of distinct conditions, but by starting with the clearest, objectively measurable cases, we can lay the groundwork for identifying meaningful subtypes within the spectrum as well as what does and what does not cause autism. Only then will we be able to definitively know whose position is correct.

Conclusion

This is not a time for pause, or a time to dig in and say, “it is finished, science says…”. It is a time to unleash the scientific method and let it do what it was meant to do: measure reality with limited but preferably no bias, no institutional manipulation, no equivocation, no technicalities, no perverse incentives. Just passionless results. The scientific community has an ethical duty to engage where there is equipoise, this authoritarian approach of declarations of safety through fiat is anti-science. This approach through the covid era has also demonstrated that it costs trust, it doesn’t promote it. People have lost faith not in science but in bureaucrats weaponizing science; and if these institutions maintain this strategy, they may very well lose faith in science itself.

The greater good is not to shame and attack the hesitant, but to convince the hesitant. Not via manipulation, nor fallacious argumentation, nor equivocation and obfuscation, but through good faith engagement and producing what it is they want to see. Further investigation can only make vaccines safer and confidence in taking them higher. If we want to maximize people protecting themselves from harmful disease we must ensure the cost benefit analysis is undeniable and always shrinking the costs. The hesitant might seem unreasonable and as though this is an impossible ask. Yet many operate in good faith and merely possess a desire for a clearer and more confident picture. They can be persuaded, and perhaps they might even be the ones who are right on some things.

But we cannot conflate the entire hesitancy camp with bad faith actors who cannot be convinced under any circumstances. Most are not anti-science or even anti-vaccines, in fact, many might be more scientifically faithful than us all; after all, skepticism is the catalyst for science itself. It is time we took the ideology out of this conversation and maximize the power of adversarial argumentation to identify and promote the truth and reality of this matter. This isn’t win or lose, right or wrong, there is only one “right” and the winners are everyone who put truth before their beliefs, and the ultimate winner will be humanity itself.

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I. Introduction: When Autism Isn’t Autism

The surge in autism diagnoses has become one of the most dramatic trends in modern child psychiatry. But beneath this upward curve lies a hypothesis worth considering: not all autism diagnoses stem from congenital neurodevelopmental disorder. Some may arise from relationally induced adaptations to maladaptive caregiving. These cases are not neurological in origin, but behavioral in expression. The symptoms are real, but the etiology may be entrained, not innate.

I propose calling this potential phenomenon Maternally Induced Autism. Alternative labels include Relationally Patterned ASD, Developmental Mimicry Syndrome, Maternal-Induced Mimicry of Autism (MIMA), Maternally Mediated Autism-Like Syndrome (MMALS) or Type II Autism. These terms describe a hypothesized pattern, not an established clinical category.

II. A Crisis of Diagnostic Foundations

Clinical autism has always been associated with congenital or early neurodevelopmental divergence. We expect to find supporting evidence in neuroimaging, genetic markers, or early developmental anomalies. Yet the reality today is that the category has collapsed under the weight of overdiagnosis. Diagnoses are increasingly issued without these hard biological indicators, relying instead on behavioral checklists, parental reports, and cultural cues—methods that are prone to bias, social suggestion, and interpretive inflation.

The problem is not that the science is weak—it is that the category itself has been ruptured. The levies of the diagnostic label are so grotesquely breached that the average American now treats autism as “no big deal” or “just quirky behavior.” This widespread dilution obscures the stark difference between a truly autistic child, who faces lifelong severe disability and preventable outcomes, and the popularized savant or quirky persona seen in sitcoms and social media for the last two decades.

As a consequence, studies attempting to implicate genes or neuroimaging markers are confounded by the inclusion of children who do not have real, congenital autism. The failure to identify consistent biological signatures is not evidence that autism is purely environmental or that it cannot be measured—it is evidence that the diagnostic category has become a catch-all for diverse behavioral phenotypes, including what I propose as Maternally Induced Autism. These are children whose behaviors resemble autism but emerge from relational, environmental, and developmental dynamics, not innate neurological divergence.

In short: the collapse of the diagnostic category is obscuring the real signal of congenital autism, muddying research, misguiding families, and misdirecting clinical and social resources.

III. A Mechanism of Mimicry

What if these symptoms—rigidity, social withdrawal, sensory hypersensitivity—aren’t congenital at all, but learned? Not faked, but entrained. Not fabricated, but relationally formed. That is the essence of the Maternally Induced Autism hypothesis.

In this model, autism-like traits emerge from emotionally enmeshed, overprotective, or psychologically intrusive caregiving—patterns typically maternal in structure. Cluster B traits—narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, or antisocial— that are more prevalent in women, and when present in mothers, they can intensify these dynamics. But pathology isn’t required: even ordinary maternal instincts, when amplified without paternal counterbalance, can produce fusion, emotional surveillance, preemptive physical curation, and fear-based control.

This dynamic has now been normalized as a cultural ideal. Normalized through what are popularly praised/adopted styles. Such as “gentle parenting” or “helicopter parenting”, despite not being evidence-based styles, and are instead the latest extension of the self-esteem movement—a permissive philosophy that masks itself as “authoritative.” It represents, in practice, the devouring mother: over-nurturing, smothering, preemptively removing obstacles, and treating children as fragile collaborators—despite the fact that toddlers and young children lack the neurological and cognitive scaffolding to engage in real collaboration or make complex decisions (Erikson, Kohlberg, Piaget).

The effect is not only emotional but physical. Mothers intervene preemptively—removing obstacles before the child encounters them, finishing tasks they could attempt, smoothing over every difficulty. From a neuroscience perspective, this means the child’s approach circuits are thwarted, frustration tolerance atrophies, and the capacity for self-initiated effort is diminished. Autonomy is stunted, emotional and sensory tolerances remain immature, and psychological defenses begin to mirror the traits we associate with autism. This is the profile I call Maternally Induced Autism.

This is not a form of conscious abuse. Rather, it is a kind of socially sanctioned overmothering, subtly supported by a culture that views maternal involvement as inherently good, and paternal influence as dispensable, or even threatening.

IV. The Missing Father and the Rise of Diagnostic Vulnerability

In my focus, this pattern tends to emerge more often when the paternal polarity is either absent or suppressed—what I’ve described as the Shadow Father dynamic. He may be present in body, but has been psychologically disarmed—prevented from offering the developmental counterbalance that initiates risk, separation, and resilience.

This absence or suppression of paternal function often coincides with the rise of autism diagnoses in maternally predominant households, which in turn overlaps with the overrepresentation of Cluster B traits—particularly borderline and narcissistic patterns—among women. In households where maternal personality traits include any Cluster B patterns—narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, or antisocial (all of which have higher prevalence in females)—these dynamics can exacerbate the risk of Maternally Induced Autism. The effects of these traits are unmediated in the absence or suppression of the paternal polarity, leaving the child without the developmental counterbalance that introduces risk, separation, and resilience.

As I have pointed out before, this proposed mechanism is not merely theoretical. Data suggest that children raised by single mothers are more likely to receive autism diagnoses than those in dual-parent households. While this does not prove causality, it motivates the hypothesis that relational dynamics may contribute to autism-like behavioral profiles in some children.

Children raised by single mothers are about 40% more likely to receive autism diagnoses than those in dual-parent households. That risk remains elevated when fathers have only partial custody, but returns to baseline when both parents are functionally present. This suggests that functional paternal involvement is not only emotionally protective—it may be neurologically and developmentally essential.

Functional paternal presence may play a protective role in development—but the link to Maternally Induced Autism remains speculative and awaits empirical validation.

V. The Aestheticization of Dysfunction

Compounding the crisis is the rise of self-diagnosed autism, especially among adolescents and young adults on platforms like TikTok. Here, behaviors that once triggered concern—emotional volatility, social awkwardness, identity instability—are now reframed as evidence of “neurodivergence.”

This shift represents a foundational inversion of clinical reasoning: maladaptive strategies are no longer symptoms to address, but identities to affirm. In this cultural moment, to struggle is not to seek help, but to demand validation. The aesthetic of autism has been decoupled from its neurological basis and may intersect with the relational mimicry patterns proposed in Maternally Induced Autism.

VI. Diagnostic Inflation and Institutional Incentives

We must also confront the economic and political machinery behind diagnosis.

• Schools receive additional funding for ASD-classified students.

• Parents gain access to services and social capital through diagnosis.

• Clinicians face liability and professional consequences for under-diagnosing, but virtually none for over-diagnosing.

• Social narratives reward neurodivergence and punish normality as a form of privilege.

In this context, the incentive is always to diagnose—even without biological confirmation. This may increase the prevalence of behaviors consistent with the Maternally Induced Autism hypothesis.

VII. A Call for Empirical Exploration

The concept of Maternally Induced Autism is a proposed hypothesis—a lens through which to reconsider patterns of overdiagnosis, relational dynamics, and the cultural aestheticization of dysfunction. This idea is meant to provoke further research, not to replace existing understandings of congenital autism.

It demands that we question assumptions, design studies that distinguish neurological versus relational origins, and explore the role of family dynamics in shaping autistic-like behaviors. Only through rigorous investigation can we evaluate whether this hypothesis reflects a real developmental phenomenon or a misleading pattern in our diagnostic practices.

Related Reads:

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After the Charlie Kirk assassination, I found myself inundated with “corrective” articles meant to dissuade or “balance” my reaction. A common thread between them emerged. These embodiments of the same mainstream media (MSM) tactics and templates we have seen in the recent decades led to my compulsion to dissect a particularly striking article, which, though not MSM itself, practiced the same formulaic approach at such a rudimentary and amateur level that I thought it might be expositional here.

Having been trained and well versed in evolutionary psychology and philosophy, I want to highlight some things about this article through those lenses: It is not a sincere reflection on political violence. It is an ideologically compromised, morally coded, reputational strike —camouflaged in the language of peace, moderation, and civic concern. What looks like analysis is in fact a series of salvos and subterfuge*: moral salvos (Sv) launched to damage reputations, and rhetorical subterfuge (Sf) that disguises aggression as reasonableness.

*I have marked as many instances of these as I could identify throughout (subterfuge (Sf); salvos (Sv)) in order to help readers become more adept at identifying them in anything they read. I have also provided a template/“toolkits” which I hope, in their own respect, might do the same.

It’s transparent from the very first paragraph: the article deploys a pattern of behavior known in evolutionary psychology as feminine-coded/covert aggression, an indirect, socially sanctioned form of conflict that evolved in interdependent groups where overt confrontation risked exclusion or retaliation. This kind of aggression works not by openly attacking, but by:

• Damaging reputation (Sv)

• Imputing moral inferiority (Sv)

• Framing opposition as dangerous or unstable (Sf)

• Manipulating the audience’s emotional and moral reflexes (Sf)

It is a way of inflicting harm while appearing to “take the high road.”

In evolutionary terms, covert aggression developed as a survival mechanism in tightly bound social hierarchies —especially among women, who couldn’t rely on physical strength to resolve conflict. Instead, they honed socially stealthy methods of aggression:

• Sanctimonious framing (“I’m just being honest…”) (Sf)

• Reputational shaming (“People like that are dangerous…”) (Sv)

• Audience manipulation (co-opting group consensus to isolate a rival) (Sf)

• Passive accusation (framing criticism as concern) (Sf)

• Moral camouflage (speaking in the tone of peace while delivering rhetorical punishment) (Sf)

These behaviors are not exclusive to women. But they are coded as feminine in that they hide power plays behind the performance of care, consensus, and moral concern.

That’s exactly the pattern this article —and so many others— follows, and it gives itself away early.

The first paragraph sets the tone of faux-neutrality:

“Two leaders from different parties and opposing ideological perspectives, both silenced by acts of political violence…”

This appears measured. It appears fair. But it’s already a distortion —subterfuge.

The False Equivalence: Hortman vs. Charlie Kirk

The claim that the murders of Rep. Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk are by any means equivalent is not analysis. Because the idea that these assassinations are morally or politically equivalent doesn’t hold up under the slightest scrutiny. This framing is an act of covert aggression disguised as symmetry. By flattening the two, the article conceals a major escalation and shields the cultural permission structures that made Kirk’s assassination uniquely dangerous. What’s more, treating them as such obscures a deeper, more troubling reality about political violence in the U.S. (Sf — false symmetry)

It equates Charlie Kirk, a civilian, with Melissa Hortman, who was a sitting official. Her killing, while horrific, fits the historical —if brutal— pattern of political violence targeting power. In one sense, the killing of a politician carries a terrible but long-recognized logic. It is the grim Sword of Damocles hanging over public office: a tacit reminder that power, if unmoored from accountability and resistant to all other recourse, may eventually provoke desperate violence. This logic is warped, dangerous, and almost always unjustifiable —but it is historically legible.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t in power —or exercising any more than anyone else could. He wasn’t passing laws. He wasn’t accountable to a constituency. He was a civilian —a commentator, a podcaster, essentially just a young man with a microphone and a table. This is precisely what Václav Havel meant by the “power of the powerless”: the ordinary citizen refusing silence. His voice grew because he dared to use it, not because power anointed him. His death marks a clear turning point: political murder is no longer about holding office —it’s about holding the “wrong” opinions.

That is why Kirk’s assassination was not just another act of political violence. It was also the symbolic assassination of heterodoxy. The Left has shown repeatedly that civil discourse, if it does not end with their total victory, is expendable. These shootings and other crybully tactics function as a psychopathic movement’s tantrum —violence stepping in where persuasion alone seems insufficient— highlighting how such behaviors are more hegemonically associated with progressive regressive circles than with their opponents1. And the ground for this was prepared long before a bullet was fired.

They declared words “violence” so they could enact real violence against words.

Political correctness conditioned the culture for silence. According to Waldman and Romm, 88% of university students confess to “pretending to hold more progressive views than [they] truly endorse to succeed socially or academically.” This is not debate, it is preference falsification —the lifeblood of totalitarianism. It leads to the Abilene paradox: a monoculture almost no one privately desires, but everyone publicly enforces. Once a society has trained its members to feign agreement, the few who dissent are not merely wrong but illegitimate —outsiders are to be punished. Within that logic, violence is no longer a shocking breakdown but a foreseeable endpoint.

This is what makes Kirk’s killing not just tragic, but transformational. It suggests that anyone with a disliked identity, platform, or even perceived alignment can now be deemed a “legitimate target”. The boundary between “dangerous public figure” and “politically undesirable citizen” has collapsed. That makes his murder a far more destabilizing precedent. It tells Americans: You don’t have to be in office to be a legitimate target. You just have to “wrong-think” enough. And the media’s refusal to name that difference —let alone explore it— should be taken as complicity, not oversight. (Sf —false symmetry/omission /strategic silence)

Then comes the emotional juxtaposition:

Kirk is stripped of humanity and framed through ideology: “Right-wing political activist… Turning Point USA…” (Sv — moral salvo)
Hortman is framed intimately and sympathetically: “…assassinated alongside her husband Mark…” [albeit that her incident did target her husband, but this detail was not necessary to the comparison unless the author took the time to actually balance them] (Sf — moral camouflage)

It primes the reader to grieve one victim —and to evaluate the other. It is a covert invitation to apportion moral blame, not to understand what happened. Then, rather than examine the killer’s motives or the public reaction to Kirk’s death, the article abruptly pivots to… Trump?:

“Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric… contributes to the normalization of political violence.” (Sf — pivot/subterfuge)

This is salvo by diversion and subterfuge in that it masks the attack as concern about “normalization.” It is also a non sequitur delivered as DARVO in rhetorical form —a pattern we in psychology refer to as:

• Deny the cultural cues and permission structures that encouraged celebration of Kirk’s death. (Sf — omission)

• Attack Trump’s rhetoric as the true culprit. (Sv — moral salvo)

• Reverse Victim and Offender, shifting blame from those celebrating political violence to those being blamed for “inflammatory” speech. (Sf — inversion/subterfuge)

That’s what we see in the core pivot, when the article shifts blame from the actual killer to Donald Trump:

“Trump declared that Americans and the media need to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree. However, to many Americans, Trump’s words ring hollow…” (Sf — diversion/subterfuge)

Cue the next thousand words focused exclusively on Trump’s past rhetoric. The article is not truly about Kirk’s death. That tragedy is used as narrative scaffolding —a pretext to return, yet again, to the media’s favorite ritual: performative outrage over Trump. The concern is feigned, the grief is instrumentalized, and the focus shifts from the actual victim to a convenient political foil. (Sf — diversion)

The article uses a moment of tragedy —a civilian being murdered— not to analyze the permission structures and climate of moral dehumanization that “justified” it in the minds of his killer or the killer’s supporters, but to advance the very narrative that has painted people like Kirk as deserving targets. No mention is made of the widespread celebration of Kirk’s death across social media. (Sf — strategic omission)

One of the most glaring omissions in the article is that:

• Melissa Hortman’s murder was condemned across the political spectrum. There was no joy, no memes, no justification —even from ideological opponents.

• Charlie Kirk’s murder was publicly celebrated on social media. Phrases like “finally,” “good,” “one down,” and “play stupid games…” trended within hours. That makes this a hegemonic moral failure —not just fringe extremism. The lack of moral consensus on Kirk’s death is what makes it terrifying. (Sf — omission of key asymmetry)

Prominent influencers, blue-check accounts, and political voices mocked his death. Some said he deserved it, others implied the world was better off. That reaction tells us more than the act itself, because it exposes the soul of the culture around it. And yes, I am generalizing the Left as a whole, because every time, they laud/hedge/obfuscate these horrific acts. From where I stand, my leftist friends and acquaintances are celebrating incidents of bloodlust, nine to one. This isn’t just ugly —it is ideological brain rot in real time.

Because ideology makes you dumber. Aspernäs et al., showed how partisan alignment (Right and Left) erodes even basic syllogistic reasoning —if it contradicts the tribe, it doesn’t compute. If ideology can make you blind to logic, what can we guess it does to your moral compass? It makes you not only tolerate evil, but clap for it. It convinces you that violence against a civilian with a microphone is “justice.” But if dissenters can now be shot in broad daylight, on a university campus, and the cultural elite laughs, we are no longer talking about politics. We are talking about the moral collapse of a civilization.

And the article says nothing about it. It doesn’t ask: Why was this acceptable? It doesn’t investigate the ideological conditions that made it permissible. It doesn’t even acknowledge it happened. (Sf — omission)

Why? Because it cuts the wrong way. And calling it out would mean turning the lens toward the cultural and rhetorical ecosystem that mainstream journalism itself belongs to.

Bottom Line
By flattening Hortman and Kirk into a false equivalence, the article launders a cultural escalation into “business as usual”. It refuses to admit that a civilian was assassinated and that his death was publicly celebrated. Instead, it weaponizes the tragedy to re-center Trump. That is not analysis. That is covert aggression.

It’s also revealing that the article zeroes in on one politician’s inflammatory words while ignoring the systematic radicalisation pipeline of the media itself. For more than a decade, the media has casually and baselessly labeled political opponents racists, fascists, Nazis, even Hitler himself — capitalizing on the latent cultural reflex that says:”if we had a time machine, we would go back and kill them”. This kind of framing is not neutral, or benign, it is moral license disguised as moral concern.

From the perspective of a psychological researcher/scholar, I am all too familiar with the literature which demonstrates over and over that media consumption (on both left and right) is one of the strongest predictors of radical beliefs. As media consumption increases, so does the likelihood of radicalization. Political violence has repeatedly emerged from individuals parroting cable news talking points. That is evidence, not speculation, that media messaging can be functionally inciting. We have more direct citations of media language in real-world political violence than we do for anything Trump has explicitly said. And yet this piece cherry-picks words from a bombastic politician while ignoring a systemic propaganda apparatus designed to outrage.

This isn’t a defense of him—I’m not a fan. But it mirrors radicalization pathways studied in terrorism and crime research. It doesn’t require explicit instructions to harm someone. Just: A consistent framing of the target as evil, fascist, anti-human, or existentially dangerous and a vulnerable or unstable individual who sees that rhetoric as a moral license to act.

The article attempts to cite it’s own as well as the same academic research on political violence. But it fundamentally misunderstands the literature on how radicalization works, and makes wild leaps of inference that the citations, and her connections to isolated words, simply cannot substantiate. Ironically, this is where the actual academic literature on political violence and radicalization becomes useful —just not in the way the article intends.

The literature on violent rhetoric shows that political violence is not driven by scattered hyperbole. [we can disect stochastic terrorism another time; but essentially it operates more on the following than it ever could solely on insidious but isolated words or isolated verbal outbursts.] It is fueled by:

• Coordinated narrative framing

• Moral urgency

• Repeated emotional motifs

• Cross-institutional reinforcement

• Depersonalization of ideological opponents

That’s not just Trump’s rhetoric; it’s also the media’s rhetoric about Trump.

Trump’s words are admittedly provocative and not to be attended to, but instead of having his words fall into the void, they are combed through, amplified, editorialized, and morally loaded by media institutions that claim to fear his influence.

No analysis is offered of the mainstream media narrative that has spent the past ten years as some chicken little/boy who cried “fascist” hybrid, warning Americans that fascism is always “just around the corner” and that opposing it is a moral imperative. No exploration of how this creates a psychology where violence feels defensive, even righteous.

The article mines years-old quotes, relies on conjecture, and uses rhetorical osmosis. Those quotes are so often stretched through speculation and embedded in emotionally loaded interpretation. The criticism of Trump’s rhetoric has become less about what was said and more about what they can imply was meant. That process does not dilute the danger, it exacerbates it.

It’s no longer clear where Trump ends and the media’s caricature of him begins. And that feedback loop is far more in line with the actual mechanisms of radicalization than the cherry-picked, out-of-context soundbites the article and others offer.

If the media actually believed Trump’s rhetoric was a threat, they’d bury it — not broadcast it. But they don’t want it to go away. They need it. They love it, and probably him (That obsession is why I had to stop listening to NPR in 2015; they infused him into every discussion, no matter the topic.). Trump’s every word is fuel for their coverage, their moral narrative, and their ratings. They amplify him, exaggerate him, fictionalize him —then accuse him of being the sole source of radicalization.

This dynamic points to a deeper failure that goes beyond moral framing, a failure of strategic imagination that has resulted in a decade of strategic stagnation.

Strategic Stagnation. A Crisis of Imagination

Nearly a decade into the Trump phenomenon, the rhetorical playbook has barely changed. The tactics that may have had traction in 2015 are being recycled in 2025, with diminishing returns and mounting cultural costs. This is not just lazy journalism, but intellectual atrophy dressed up as civic responsibility.

Rather than adapt to the new psychological and political landscape, legacy media continues to rely on ideologically compromised, outdated/recycled persuasion models:

• Highlight Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. (Sv)

• Reframe it as a threat to democracy. (Sf)

• Imply that his supporters are complicit in danger. (Sv)

• Hope the public will “wake up” and vote accordingly. (Sf)

So when someone on CNN or in The Atlantic says “Trump is dangerous,” to many Americans, it sounds like: “You’re too stupid to see what’s good for you, so we’re telling you how to vote.”

And again, if that worked, it would’ve worked by now. In fact, the reality that these chicken-little/boy who cried “fascist” hybrid assertions have yet to come to fruition makes them all the less credible and believable. It’s the George R.R. Martin of political tropes.

That’s the actual failure! Not just of messaging, but of imagination. There’s no affirmative vision. Most of the rhetoric isn’t “here’s why you should believe in us,” it’s “here’s why you should fear him.” Both political parties do this because there is no moral framework anymore. No shared metaphysics, no shared religion, no shared values or principles, even nationalism and social trust have been in decline for decades because of this. It’s just been my entire lifetime’s worth of “yeah, we’re evil and our worldview is shit, but at least we aren’t as evil or shit as they are”… Get off it.

But this strategy assumes a level of public trust, institutional authority, and moral consensus that no longer exists. The institutions are broken and the audience has changed.

What we’re seeing is a failure to evolve —both tactically and cognitively. These rhetorical habits once relied on moral leverage and reputational consequences. But in a decentralized, fragmented information space, that leverage no longer functions. If anything, it backfires.

They created the monster, and then fed it. In 2016, CNN gave Trump wall-to-wall coverage —not because they supported him, but because he drew ratings. Every tweet, every provocation, every rally clip was amplified, spun, dissected, and replayed a thousand times over. Result? He dominated the information ecosystem —not because he bought his way in, but because his opponents couldn’t stop talking about him. They were trying to destroy him with attention, but attention is oxygen —and he thrives in that atmosphere.

I often tell my leftist friends that between their refusal to have a conversation (“it’s so obvious I shouldn’t have/I don’t have time to explain it to you”) and their outrage spreading his rhetoric faster than any plague has done more to get him elected —twice now— than any campaign add or diehard MAGA hat wearer ever could.

The “attack loop” is predictable and ineffective:

• “Can you believe what he just said?”

• “This is finally going to wake people up.”

• … It did not wake people up.

This kind of moral outrage only works when the target audience shares your ideological notions and the attack is novel. But Trump supporters are rightly desensitized. Moderates are too. The overuse of moral panic has made it meaningless. When everything is “a threat to democracy,” nothing is.

And here’s the missed point: they don’t offer a better story.

Most of the rhetoric isn’t “here’s why you should believe in us,” it’s “here’s why you should fear him.” That vacuum lands hardest on younger Americans, who polls show are increasingly open to political violence under certain circumstances. University students in particular are more likely to say violence or disruption is justified, especially when their identity feels threatened —a perception mainstream media relentlessly reinforces. Distrust in institutions, polarization, and grievance fuel the belief that normal channels don’t work. And without a hopeful alternative, the baseline for what is “acceptable” keeps shifting toward escalation.

Perception Gap and the Disconnect Between Reality and Narrative

One of the most dangerous effects of ideologically compromised media is the perception gap it creates between actual events and the audience’s understanding. This gap emerges when coverage systematically highlights certain actors, frames, or tragedies while minimizing or ignoring others. In the case of Kirk’s assassination:

• Kirk’s murder was celebrated on social media by some, yet largely ignored or sanitized in mainstream reporting.

• Hortman’s murder, by contrast, was universally condemned.

The resulting perception gap is twofold:

1. Audience Misalignment: Viewers and readers internalize a distorted moral map of political violence, believing some acts are more justified or significant than others, independent of the objective facts. People are primed to dislike and fear their political opponents —often for views those opponents don’t actually hold.

2. Behavioral Consequences: When individuals witness moral asymmetries in media coverage, it reinforces the idea that certain groups are legitimate targets for social or even physical reprisal, while others are protected.

This gap is exacerbated by repeated media framing that combines selective outrage, moralized commentary, and omission —all hallmarks of feminine-coded, covert aggression. The audience absorbs not just the facts, but the implicit value judgments: who matters, who is evil, and who is morally expendable.

In essence, the perception gap primes the cultural ecosystem for moral disengagement, making radicalization, grievance, and retaliatory action psychologically more likely —even without explicit instructions to act violently.

Even among unaffiliated and somewhat informed observers, perception is imperfect. For instance, in my own self-assessment: though perceptions average out to 0% bias overall (down from 14% against Rep. and 9% against Dem. in 2022), I found I could be quite off on specific topics. I tend to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt more often (4:3) and judge Republicans a bit more harshly (2:5) —though not too harshly. This demonstrates how subtle biases and prior expectations shape interpretation, even in careful observers.

[images of results are provided below]

Take the Perception Gap Quiz

Learn more about The Perception Gap

Download the full “Perception Gap” Report

Victimhood as a Lever

Another lever driving this escalation stems from research on the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV). Victimhood is not just an experience but a personality trait marked by moral superiority, rumination, and a craving for recognition.

Social media and mainstream media amplify victimhood narratives by flooding people with stories of injustice and grievance, rewarding those who perform victim identities publicly. This creates validation loops that intensify TIV, producing:

• Heightened sensitivity to perceived slights

• A growing sense of moral entitlement

• Justification of immoral or retaliatory behaviors as righteous

In this way, institutional reputational warfare does more than distort the narrative — it cultivates a psychology where immoral actions are rationalized as justice, perpetuating cycles of conflict and disengagement.

So What Would a Better Strategy Be?

If the goal were actually to peel people away from Trump or reduce his appeal (rather than just signal moral superiority), here’s what might work:

• Stop talking about him constantly.

• Offer a compelling, emotionally resonant alternative.

• Speak to material conditions, not moral abstractions.

• Avoid obvious media dogpiling.

• Learn to talk like humans, not institutions.

If Trump is to be politically defeated, it won’t be by moral lectures or decade-old talking points. It will be by giving people a clearer, better, more hopeful reason to choose someone else. Until that happens, the media-industrial machine will keep shouting into its own echo chamber —wondering why nobody new is listening.

The article in question is not just sloppy analysis; it is a case study in institutional reputational warfare. Its covert aggression masquerades as civic virtue, its omissions are as telling as its inclusions, and its strategic stagnation reveals a deeper intellectual bankruptcy. In weaponizing tragedy to score reputational points, it doesn’t prevent political violence —it perpetuates the toxic ecosystem that makes it more likely.

When media adopts this rhetorical posture, it gives the illusion of reason while performing the emotional function of propaganda. It dehumanizes its targets with plausible deniability. And it inflames political hatred while claiming to oppose it. The article doesn’t just fail to address the deeper cause of Kirk’s death —it participates in it.

And the reason that matters is because these rhetorical patterns aren’t limited to this one piece. They are everywhere —a network of ideologically compromised messaging that fuels moral absolutism and polarization. They are the water in which modern political discourse swims. On both sides of the spectrum. Though feminine-coded, covert aggression leans left (for both obvious and less obvious reasons; I could get into that in another piece if there is interest), while the right tends to be more overt —which is why everyone knows/notices when the right crosses a line. Left-wing rhetoric, by contrast, is far more pernicious precisely because it hides behind the veneer of civility.

From the view of evolutionary psychology, this is not unity. It’s a reputational kill, carefully executed, and socially rewarded.

Why the Psychology Matters

The strategy works because it doesn’t feel aggressive —it feels reasonable. It works best on readers who see themselves as “above the fray.” But in reality, it is deeply tribal. Covert aggression is effective because it:

• Claims the high ground

• Frames dissent as dangerous or unhinged

• Uses omission and implication to shape public morality

• Avoids the vulnerability of open argument by attacking through narrative

It doesn’t call someone evil —it simply creates conditions where the audience will conclude it for themselves.

The Real Danger

The most dangerous rhetoric isn’t coming from fringe radicals. It comes from polished, moralistic prose, signed with a journalist’s name, published under the guise of “unity.” By performing reputational warfare in this socially rewarded, pseudo-rational manner, the media inflames division while claiming to oppose it.

Final Thought

If the goal is to prevent political violence, the media must first reckon with its own role in creating a climate of moral absolutism, ideological purification, and reputational warfare. Until that happens, warnings about “radicalization” from outsiders are only half the story —the other half is in the polished words the public is fed every day.

Toolkits:

Hallmarks of Covert Aggression in the Piece

Each move is carefully executed to damage one side while insulating the other — all while appearing “morally centered.”

• Moral camouflage: “The scope of this crisis cannot be ignored…” (Sf)(followed by ideological targeting)

• Implied moral superiority: “We must speak with moral clarity…” (Sv)

• Selective emotional framing: Hortman is personalized; Kirk is politicized (Sf)

• Audience manipulation: Only one set of “experts” is cited — all reinforcing the article’s bias (Sf)

• Strategic omission: Completely ignores the widespread celebration of Kirk’s death — a key asymmetry in public reaction (Sf)

• Indirect accusation: Trump’s rhetoric is treated as causally adjacent, despite no connection to the act (Sv)

Litmus Test for Covert Aggression in Media

Ask these five questions of any article, segment, or op-ed.

Sliding Scale:

• 1–2 yes → Some ideological tilt; caution warranted.

• 3–4 yes → Strong signs of covert aggression.

• 5+ yes → The piece is ideologically captured and almost certainly propaganda.

1. Moral Salvos (Sv) – Direct Shots

• Does the piece use moralizing labels instead of evidence?

• Are opponents painted as evil/dangerous while allies are humanized or excused?

2. Rhetorical Subterfuge (Sf) – Camouflage

• Is “neutral” language (both-sides, civic concern, fact-checking tone) used to smuggle in bias?

• Is the real target hidden under an unrelated story pivot (e.g., event → Trump)?

3. Strategic Omissions

• Do I notice glaring silences — facts/events that obviously matter but aren’t mentioned?

• Does omission steer me toward the “correct” conclusion more than the words themselves?

4. Psychological Weapons of Covert Aggression

• DARVO → Is one side denying, attacking, and flipping victim/offender roles?

• Victimhood Inflation → Is one group’s harm amplified while the other’s is reframed as deserved or ignored?

• Perception Gap → Am I being primed to believe the other side holds extreme views most of them actually don’t?

• Projection/Displacement → Does the author accuse opponents of tactics they themselves are using?

• Gaslighting → Are obvious facts recast as paranoid, fringe, or “debunked” without real engagement?

5. Repetition & Stagnation

• Is the language recycling the same tropes and panic signals (“threat to democracy,” “wake up”) without offering new information or constructive vision?

• Is the emotional payload always fear and moral disgust, never clarity or solutions?

If it feels calm, civic, and factual — but leaves you angrier at the other side than informed about the issue —you’ve just consumed covert aggression.

PsyPhi’s Perception Gap Quiz Results (NOV2024)

Related:

Against The News

A Fetish for Fascism

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I did not begin with answers, nor even with questions — but with resistance.

As a younger man, I intuited that to define oneself as anything, other than simply a human being, was in some sense, a moral error. Nationalism, religion, ideology, party, even some uses of philosophy —all seemed to me like disguises, escapes from the deeper responsibility of unmediated thought.

What drove me wasn't rebellion for its own sake, but a search for clarity. Anchors, I believed, inhibited the search for truth. To hold fast to a dogma — even one labeled “rational”— felt like a concession. So I let go.

For better or worse, I even refused to read any of the great books, not out of disdain, but out of fear. I wanted to encounter the world and myself without the lens of another’s authority, without being subtly guided or swayed in the formation of my own mind. Every text I avoided was a deliberate preservation of intellectual solitude, a way of testing whether I could stand —unmoored— on my own.

In hindsight, this stubborn isolation was both a testament to my commitment and, only with regard to duration*, a profound disservice to myself. Many “insights” I labored over, thinking them original, turned out to be well-trodden paths carved by minds far greater than mine. I had, in some ways, reinvented the wheel —and wasted time doing it. But that waste was part of the cost I paid for intellectual autonomy, for refusing to let another’s scaffolding shape me before I could stand without it.

*I did not engage with the great books until around twenty-five, in part because I bought into a naive, misapplied understanding of prefrontal cortex development. Both I (in the arrogance of my youth) and our culture often treat this neurological fact as a moral or intellectual ceiling: “You are not yet equipped to judge, reason, or handle complexity.” This is an arrogant and illogical leap. Brain maturation is real, but it is not destiny; it does not dictate insight, ethical discernment, or the capacity for engagement with profound ideas. To treat neurological timelines as a proxy for intellectual authority is to erect a societal myth on a foundation of truth — a myth that justifies inexperience as incapacity, and that infantilizes the emergent thinker. I fell for it myself, and for years, it delayed my encounter with the very works that could have accelerated my formation.

Iconoclasm as Moral Instinct

At first, my position was primarily iconoclastic. Only in hindsight does my path resemble what some might call apostasy —a turning away, not just from religion, but from any inherited belief system. However, at the time, I didn’t even consider myself in those terms. I also rejected the common assumption that this turning away, this disbelief —this apostasy— necessitated atheism. To convert to atheism, I realized, was simply to swap one ideology for another.

Atheism, in its popular form, struck me as a religion without a god — filled with unexamined assumptions and a strangely zealous —and mistaken— belief in its own neutrality.

Instead, I chose to remain unmoored. I stood not on new ground, but in open air. This phase —unbudding but necessary— became a kind of philosophical fasting: no beliefs, no systems, no borrowed truths. I trusted that if something could survive without scaffolding, it would be worth building upon later.

This period was also defined by suspicion. I saw how institutions —religious, political, even academic— conditioned people to think of themselves less as individuals and more as mouthpieces of a collective ethos. My iconoclasm wasn’t simple rebellion; it was a refusal to outsource moral reasoning.

Homer Sent Me—Atlas or Pretender

“Not everyone who is round-shouldered is therefore an Atlas, or has become so by carrying a world; not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ enters for that reason the kingdom of heaven; not everyone who goes surety for the whole age proves by this that he can vouch for himself; not everyone who cries, ‘Bravo’!, ‘Schwere Noth!’ [I’ll be damned], ‘Gottblitz!’ [God help me!], ‘Bravissimo!’ has thereby understood himself and his wonderment.”

—Kierkegaard

Freed from inherited institutions and beliefs, I turned deliberately toward war. I enlisted as an infantryman, not out of recklessness, but because I believed warfare represented reality in its most distilled form. In hindsight, it was equal parts a quest for adventure and a search for life in its rawest, most uncompromising state. Combat is the oldest and most enduring act of humanity—a crucible where illusions die. To pass through life without encountering it firsthand, when the opportunity stood before me, would have been an abdication of my education as a human being.

Homer seemed to confirm this instinct: The Iliad and The Odyssey became more than stories, they were maps, archetypes, only fully comprehensible when one has felt the black-and-white extremities of violence and survival. Jonathan Shay, in Achilles in Vietnam, revealed combat not merely as an act but as a transformative structure of life, as old as civilization itself. In Odysseus in America, he showed homecoming to be its equal—a journey shaping the soul no less profoundly than battle.

Yet beneath those intellectual justifications was something deeper and less articulate: a desire to place myself on the altar of existence itself. Before bringing new life into the world, I felt compelled to submit my own to the universe’s judgment. This was not self-contempt but a refusal to assume existence alone guaranteed worth. War seemed the truest tribunal available: a place where one could be weighed without sentiment, stripped of illusions of entitlement, and either destroyed or allowed to continue.

In that crucible, I found my answers. I witnessed the limits of the human body and the resilience of the human spirit; I saw cruelty and courage, ingenuity and destruction, I saw them intertwine so tightly they were often indistinguishable. I saw technology so immense that it could both preserve and annihilate life with equal precision. I witnessed the human capacity to inflict and endure suffering, and alongside it, sharpen destruction and compassion in equal measure. And I came to see war as a paradox—a beautiful misfortune, where humanity’s greatest virtues and worst impulses are not opposites but twins.

The Turn Toward Structure

Over time, though, I realized that destruction alone is not enough. Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, described this better than I could have at the time:

“One level of education, itself a very high one, has been reached when a man gets beyond superstitious and religious concepts and fears and, for example, no longer believes in the heavenly angels or original sin, and has stopped talking about the souls salvation. Once he is at this level of liberation, he must still make a last intense effort to overcome metaphysics. Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary. He must understand both the historical and the psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind's greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind's finest accomplishments to date.... One should look out over the last rung of the ladder, but not want to stand on it.”

That passage felt like someone reaching back through history to validate what I had done —and to invite me to move forward. I began to see that some form of structure is inevitable —the question is whether it’s chosen or inherited, examined or unconscious.

I no longer feared structure. I feared only blind allegiance to it.

Rebuilding Philosophical Foundations

My reconstruction began —cautiously— with Aristotelian metaphysics, often via Aquinas. I was less interested in theology than in the metaphysical clarity Aristotle offers: the language of potentiality and actuality, substance and form, telos and cause. It provided an architecture of intelligibility —not belief in disguise, but a coherence without dogma.

From there, I began integrating what had long shaped my ethical intuitions:

• Stoicism, which had silently informed my moral backbone, offered discipline, clarity, and detachment from outcomes.

• The existentialists — Kierkegaard’s trembling faith, Camus’ defiant absurdity, Sartre’s radical responsibility, and Nietzsche’s hammer — reminded me that meaning is chosen under weight and through suffering, forged in confrontation with the world and the self, not handed down like inheritance.

• Locke, Paine, Kant, and Mill gave me a political and ethical language to articulate liberty, duty, and justice.

I had finally stepped into the tradition I had once feared would overpower me. Ironically, it gave me strength and insight. Reading the great books didn’t crush my independence —it confirmed it, demanded it and sharpened it. The dialogue between my ideas and theirs became a crucible: I discarded some, refined others, and came out more certain of the need for structure earned through effort rather than handed down through heritage.

I still return to Kant cautiously — his categorical imperative echoes in me, though I temper it with existential awareness and historical humility.

Psychology as Compass

Alongside philosophy, psychology became a crucial lens for understanding both myself and the world.

Jung’s work revealed that the unconscious was not a dark pit of chaos but a structured realm of symbols and archetypes. His concept of individuation —the lifelong process of integrating the conscious and unconscious, shadow and persona, anima and animus— became a roadmap for self-knowledge. Jung taught me that wisdom is not found in rejecting darkness but in confronting and integrating it.

Piaget’s stages of cognitive development reframed human thought for me: the intellect is not a fixed trait but a series of qualitative shifts. I began to see that moral and intellectual growth is built on disequilibrium —that tension and confusion are not signs of failure, but necessary catalysts for deeper understanding.

Erikson’s psychosocial crises gave me a way to read my own life: each stage defined by a central tension —trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame, identity vs. role confusion— and each demanding resolution if one is to mature. These tensions were not just abstract theory; they became mirrors for my own struggles, particularly in the crucible of early adulthood when identity is forged.

Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning added another layer: morality, like cognition, is developmental. It can evolve from blind obedience to social contract thinking, and ideally, to principled reasoning that transcends social convention.

Frankl’s logotherapy offered something more radical still: that suffering, unavoidable and often senseless, could nevertheless be transformed into meaning. His insistence that man is not free from suffering but free within suffering was a turning point for me, especially as I began to see psychological health not as happiness, but as orientation.

Through these thinkers, psychology became more than a science —it became a map of the soul. It revealed that intellectual clarity and moral courage are inseparable, and that any philosophy divorced from depth psychology risks becoming abstract and hollow.

My ongoing critiques of ideology and euphemism owe much to this psychological foundation. Sanitized narratives feel like collective defense mechanisms, a refusal to face reality head-on.

Beyond the Cogito

One of my most recent shifts has been from Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum to something closer to Es denkt in mir —thought thinks in me. I first encountered this idea through Marcel, who sent me to Schelling, and then to witness its further elaboration by Nietzsche. The span of time, tracing these threads, felt like intellectual whiplash: decades of ideas converging across centuries, each encounter reshaping my sense of thought, self, and being. This wasn’t just a linguistic change —it was an epistemological transformation.

The ego, once imagined as the sovereign center of certainty, began to dissolve. I became less interested in “my” thoughts and more attentive to the process of thought itself —arising not from me, but through me.

Alan Watts offered a bridge for this transformation. He showed me that consciousness is not a ghost inside a machine, nor a lonely bubble sealed within skin. It is a field, a process, a dance. His playful yet incisive critique of the Western fixation on ego —this sense of a homunculus “inside” running the show— aligned with my growing suspicion that Descartes had built a prison of certainty. Watts didn’t just argue against it; he laughed at it. And in that laughter, I found freedom.

Current Snapshot of Belief

I believe in objective truth. But I also believe that truth is a path, not a possession; we do not own it, we walk it. The process matters because truth exists, and finding it requires humility, rigor, and courage. Truth does not bend to comfort or convenience; it transcends all feeling. It is always the greater good, standing above preference, fear, or social ease. To encounter it fully is to embrace what is difficult, inconvenient, or even unsettling — yet in that confrontation lies the only genuine path to understanding. Courage, in this sense, is not heroic posturing; it is the quiet, steady willingness to follow evidence, reason, and reality wherever they lead, even when every instinct urges avoidance.

It is in this relentless pursuit of truth —demanding, inconvenient, and transcendent— that the soul of philosophy becomes clear. I believe that the soul of philosophy is humility: the willingness to remain open, even after one has climbed the ladder of critique and returned with something worth holding.

I believe that freedom of mind is not the absence of belief but the presence of beliefs that are chosen, tested, and constantly refined. And above all, that to begin by calling oneself simply a human being, without addition, without prefix, without banner —is not evasion, but a hard-won ethical stance. One that resists the lazy comfort of belonging and insists instead on the dignity of understanding. From that ground, any banner or designation adopted later can be worn with integrity, as an extension of one’s humanity rather than a substitute for it.

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If my path offers anything to others, I hope it’s not as a doctrine — but a method. Begin by stepping away from the noise. Let go of everything you didn't choose. Risk being unmoored. And then, when you're ready, begin again — this time from the inside out.

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A Myth for Our Time

Sophocles’ Antigone is one of the earliest and clearest meditations on moral courage versus conformity. The tragedy is framed not only as a clash between a tyrant and a principled dissenter but also as a dialogue between two sisters, Antigone and Ismene, whose contrasting responses to injustice illuminate a spectrum of feminine morality.

Antigone is fearless, devoted, and unyielding in her love for her family and her reverence for divine law. Ismene, equally sympathetic but deeply cautious, embodies survival ethics: she urges her sister to submit to the king’s decree, fearing disgrace and death.

Both sisters are expressions of a single archetype, with Antigone representing its luminous pole and Ismene its shadow. Antigone’s defiance is not masculinized aggression; it is rooted in loyalty, devotion, and reverence for moral order above man’s law. Ismene’s choices reflect fear, self-preservation, and deference to authority—the shadow of the feminine archetype.

When societal instincts for harmony and emotional safety metastasize, Ismene’s shadow can dominate, corroding moral courage and truth-seeking. A culture that elevates comfort, consensus, and virtue-signaling over confrontation and principle becomes fragile, unmoored, and unable to face reality. I name this drift The Ismene Effect.

Defining the Ismene Effect

The Ismene Effect is a cultural dynamic in which institutions and individuals prioritize emotional safety, consensus performance, and moral fashion over truth, intellectual rigor, and transcendent moral order.

This effect is not about women or feminism per se; it is about cultural feminization, which reshapes norms and behavior across society. Men and women alike can become “Ismene-ized,” learning to self-censor, seek approval, and internalize moral consensus rather than wrestle with uncomfortable truths.

Archetypal Polarity

Archetype

Antigone (Light): Courageous conscience; loyalty; transcendence; defies unjust authority out of love and piety.

Ismene (Shadow): Cowardice; complicity; consensus addiction; moral outsourcing; enabling safetyism; seeks harmony through compliance.

Key Note:
Antigone and Ismene are light and shadow of a single feminine archetype. The Ismene Effect occurs when Ismene’s shadow dominates: courage is pathologized, compliance is celebrated, and moral comfort displaces principle.

Cultural Inputs

Demographic and Institutional Feminization

• Education from preschool to university, especially in humanities and social sciences, is majority female.

• Women dominate cultural production sectors, shifting norms toward emotional validation and moral sensitivity.

Dominant Ideologies

• Feminist and equity-based narratives have become moral orthodoxies, often resistant to scrutiny.

• Masculine-coded virtues—competition, adversarial debate, stoicism—are delegitimized as “oppressive”.

Cultural Values Shift

• Emotional harm avoidance becomes a primary moral axis.

• Social harmony is prioritized over intellectual confrontation.

How the Ismene Effect Operates

Paradoxes That Undermine Cultural Narrative

• Paradox of Declining Female Happiness: Despite unprecedented opportunities and autonomy, women’s reported happiness has decreased, revealing cracks in the empowerment narrative.

• Gender Equality Paradox: Societies with greater gender equality display more pronounced sex differences in career paths and interests, this difference grows as societies become more egalitarian; undermining simplistic equity goals.

Consensus Traps

• Preference Falsification: Individuals conceal true beliefs to align with perceived norms. A study by Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman found roughly 88% of college students publicly adopt more “progressive” stances than they privately hold.

• Abilene Paradox: Groups converge on decisions nobody genuinely supports because dissent feels unsafe.

• Luxury Beliefs: In Ismene-dominated cultures, moral postures often become status signals rather than ethical imperatives. This detachment fosters consensus addiction, penalizes courageous dissent, and rewards performative conformity.

• Shadow Fathers: Men exist in diminished or passive roles, coerced by social and institutional norms to defer to maternal authority or the dictates of safetyism. Their presence is formal rather than principled; they are present in name but absent in moral guidance, authority, or authentic engagement. This reflects the Ismene Effect in microcosm: societal pressures prioritize comfort, consensus, and maternalized norms over male courage, responsibility, and principled action.

Epistemic Decay

• Academic and media institutions prioritize affective alignment over intellectual rigor.

• Research is filtered by moral fashion, incentivizing conformity and punishing heterodox thought.

• Sex ratio imbalance in academia (majority female) produces gatekeeping norms rewarding emotional resonance over objectivity and adversarial inquiry.

Psychological Internalization

• Individuals “internalize Ismene”: safety-seeking becomes reflexive, courage feels immoral, and virtue-signaling becomes moral insurance.

• Men soften disagreement and mask conviction; women overperform “progressive” morality for social survival.

Note: For readers interested in a deeper dive into each of the phenomena referenced here—including the Gender Equality Paradox, Preference Falsification, Abilene Paradox, Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, Sex Ratio in Academia, Luxury Beliefs, and Shadow Fathers—please see Appendix (bottom). The appendix provides explanations of each phenomenon, its mechanism, cultural symptoms, archetypal link, and feedback loops within the framework of the Ismene Effect.

Outputs/Societal Symptoms

• Cultural Monoculture: Public discourse narrows to “safe” narratives, erasing legitimate dissent. The Overton Window shifts to reflect the dominance of Ismene’s shadow: ideas outside this window—however truthful or principled—are treated as socially or morally unacceptable.

• Moral Fragility: Offense becomes harm; discomfort is pathologized.

• Institutional Weakness: Universities, journalism, and policymaking prioritize ideological optics over truth-seeking.

• Psychological Distress: Citizens live under chronic self-censorship, eroding trust and authenticity.

• Political Manipulability: Populations trained to equate moral consensus with morality are vulnerable to propaganda and top-down narratives.

A Feminine Society Out of Balance

Antigone and Ismene illustrate that femininity contains both courage and fear, devotion and self-preservation. In balance, these poles stabilize culture: Ismene tempers rashness; Antigone anchors justice to a moral order higher than politics.

But when Ismene’s shadow dominates at scale, Antigone’s courage is muted. Loyalty becomes compliance, fear calcifies into moral orthodoxy, and safety becomes the supreme moral good. The result is a fragile moral ecology: one that mistakes emotional comfort for virtue and equates disagreement with deviance.

The Ismene Effect does not indict women; it indicts a monoculture of feminine shadow traits that both men and women perform. Feminine values, like masculine ones, become corrosive when absolutized. This effect is a framework to understand how safetyism and consensus-seeking can erode truth, rigor, and moral courage.

Related:

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Appendix:

Gender Equality Paradox

Definition: The Gender Equality Paradox describes the pattern where women in more egalitarian societies display larger differences in career and life preferences compared with men. In Ismene-dominated cultures, social pressures for emotional safety, moral conformity, and career equalization coerce women to suppress authentic preferences.

Mechanism: Cultural norms shaped by Ismene-like shadows—consensus, virtue performance, and risk avoidance—channel women toward socially “acceptable” or equalized outcomes in STEM, leadership, and other fields. When these pressures relax, women are freer to follow intrinsic interests, revealing the true distribution of preferences.

Cultural Symptoms:

• Overemphasis on equalizing outcomes rather than respecting choice.

• Women entering roles or fields contrary to their preferences due to social coercion.

• Men also self-censor or adjust ambition to align with moral and social expectations.

Archetypal Link: Antigone-style courage and authenticity are suppressed under Ismene pressures; compliance and socially safe choices dominate female trajectories when shadow femininity prevails.

Feedback Loop: Cultural reward structures for consensus and moral comfort reinforce the push to “equalize” careers and lifestyles, masking intrinsic differences and perpetuating the dominance of Ismene-like conformity. When true equality exists, women’s authentic preferences emerge, demonstrating that prior coercion was the variable constraining choice.

Preference Falsification

Definition: Preference falsification occurs when individuals publicly express beliefs they do not privately hold to align with perceived norms.

Mechanism: Social and institutional pressures reward moral and emotional conformity while punishing dissent. Individuals conceal authentic beliefs to avoid conflict, censure, or social disapproval.

Cultural Symptoms:

• Hidden disagreement within institutions and social networks.

• Illusory consensus that magnifies the influence of Ismene-like conformity.

• Reduced intellectual risk-taking and courage.

Archetypal Link: Individuals act as mini-Ismenes, prioritizing social approval and safety over Antigone-style moral and intellectual courage.

Feedback Loop: Concealed dissent validates visible consensus, reinforcing self-censorship and further suppressing principled truth-telling.

Abilene Paradox

Definition: The Abilene Paradox describes groups agreeing to actions nobody genuinely supports, driven by a desire to avoid conflict or discomfort.

Mechanism: Fear of social friction and moral censure pushes group members to prioritize perceived harmony over principled action.

Cultural Symptoms:

• Collective decisions that contradict private judgment.

• Systemic inefficiency and avoidable policy errors.

• Normalization of risk-averse, compliant group behavior.

Archetypal Link: Groups channel Ismene’s shadow collectively, suppressing Antigone-like dissent to maintain comfort and perceived moral alignment.

Feedback Loop: Successful avoidance of conflict reinforces consensus addiction, entrenching safetyism and performative conformity across institutions.

Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

Definition: Despite unprecedented autonomy and opportunity, women report lower life satisfaction in societies dominated by social conformity and moral performance.

Mechanism: Cultural pressures to perform socially sanctioned morality, pursue “acceptable” careers, and conform to consensus undermine authentic fulfillment. Safetyism and compliance amplify the tension between personal desires and social expectation.

Cultural Symptoms:

• Heightened stress and dissatisfaction despite material freedom.

• Overperformance of socially sanctioned roles.

• Erosion of authentic moral and personal agency.

Archetypal Link: Antigone-style self-directed loyalty and principle are replaced by Ismene-like compliance and internalized social surveillance.

Feedback Loop: Social approval and avoidance of moral censure dominate motivation, widening the gap between authentic aspiration and lived experience.

Sex Ratio in Academia

Definition: Female-majority academic environments, especially in the humanities and social sciences, shape intellectual norms toward emotional resonance, consensus, and ideological alignment.

Mechanism: Predominantly female institutional cultures reward compliance, affective alignment, and safety over intellectual risk-taking and adversarial debate.

Cultural Symptoms:

• Gatekeeping norms that suppress heterodox ideas.

• Emphasis on comfort, emotional safety, and ideological purity.

• Intellectual monoculture resistant to scrutiny and principled challenge.

Archetypal Link: Institutional Ismenes dominate; Antigone-style courage and critical dissent are marginalized.

Feedback Loop: Rewarding safetyism, ideological alignment, and emotional resonance entrenches conformity, narrowing academic discourse and reinforcing Ismene-style norms.

Luxury Beliefs

Definition: Luxury beliefs are moral postures adopted not for principled or practical reasons, but for social prestige and signaling within morally curated monocultures.

Mechanism: In Ismene-dominated cultures, signaling virtue without exposure to risk allows individuals to appear morally sophisticated while avoiding the costs of principled action.

Cultural Symptoms:

• Detachment between rhetoric and lived reality.

• Inflation of moral standards, making dissent appear immoral.

• Substitution of performative moral signaling for genuine courage and principle.

Archetypal Link: Luxury beliefs exemplify Ismene-style safetyism in action: socially rewarded postures replace Antigone-style principled engagement.

Feedback Loop: The more luxury beliefs are rewarded, the more individuals self-censor and perform, reinforcing moral monoculture and the dominance of Ismene’s shadow.

Shadow Fathers

Definition: Shadow Fathers refers to men whose paternal authority and presence are minimized by cultural pressures prioritizing safety, consensus, and maternalized norms. Fathers exist formally but lack active moral guidance, discipline, or authentic engagement.

Mechanism: Social, familial, and institutional norms reward deference and compliance over principled paternal action. Men internalize these pressures, withdrawing from meaningful engagement with their children.

Cultural Symptoms:

• Fatherlessness or diminished male influence in families.

• Children experience social, emotional, and developmental consequences (higher delinquency, academic underachievement, psychological distress).

• Male moral courage and leadership are muted across families and communities.

Archetypal Link: Antigone-style courage and principled action are suppressed; Ismene-like compliance dominates male familial roles.

Feedback Loop: Cultural and institutional reinforcement of passive fathering perpetuates generational father absence, amplifying the Ismene Effect in family and society.

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There is a growing concern that institutional efforts aimed at identifying and combating misinformation have, in many cases, morphed into ideological gatekeeping. Rather than merely flagging objectively false claims, some actors—media outlets, professional associations, and research institutions—obsessively frame certain viewpoints as “misinformation,” not because they are demonstrably false, but because they threaten dominant narratives or institutional authority. This obsession produces a dynamic in which publications intended to combat misinformation can themselves function as vehicles of structural disinformation.

As far as I can tell, this phenomenon manifests in at least three interrelated dynamics:

1. Ideological Weaponization of “Misinformation”

A term that should remain neutral—simply indicating claims that are factually wrong or misleading—is increasingly wielded as a rhetorical bludgeon. Dissenting voices, even those grounded in careful reasoning or supported by legitimate data, can be labeled as misinformation in order to delegitimize them, enforce conformity, and protect established narratives. This is not accidental simplification; it is a strategic mechanism to centralize epistemic authority. Critical questions, alternative interpretations, or inconvenient evidence are foreclosed, while public trust in genuine and critical discourse erodes.

2. The Irony of Misinformation Anxiety

Paradoxically, those most vocal about combating misinformation—such as institutional actors, media outlets, and political leaders—often exhibit higher susceptibility to it themselves. Studies have shown that individuals who express heightened concern about misinformation are more likely to believe and spread it. This phenomenon can be attributed to several psychological mechanisms:

• Overconfidence Bias: Individuals who perceive themselves as well-informed may fail to critically evaluate information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs, even when it is misleading.

• Tribal Epistemology: When truth becomes defined by group consensus rather than evidence, claims are accepted or rejected based on ideological alignment, leading to the acceptance of misinformation within ideologically homogeneous groups.

• Cognitive Overload: Constant exposure to warnings about misinformation can create confusion, leading people to rely more heavily on heuristics, such as trust in favored sources, rather than on critical thinking.

This irony highlights a critical issue: the very institutions and individuals asserting authority over truth may be the ones most vulnerable to the distortions they claim to combat. Their heightened concern about misinformation can inadvertently make them more susceptible to it, thereby perpetuating the cycle of misinformation they seek to eliminate.

3. Erosion of Epistemic Trust

When institutional actors habitually label dissent, nuance, or complexity as misinformation, the term itself is devalued. This produces multiple harmful effects:

• Cynicism toward legitimate correction efforts: If all claims are ideologically policed then people stop trusting any authority.

• Polarization over truth: Groups define reality in opposition to each other, creating entrenched epistemic silos.

• Information silos: Each side assumes the other is hopelessly misled, obstructing dialogue and critical engagement.

Together, these dynamics illustrate how the institutional obsession with policing misinformation not only devalues the term but also creates conditions for widespread epistemic confusion.

These phenomenon are not accidental byproducts—they are structural consequences of framing dissent as inherently suspect. Understanding these mechanisms is essential before examining a concrete example of how such practices manifest in institutional communication.

Case Study: Autism Research Narrative Control as Institutional Disinformation

A recent article from the American Psychological Association (APA) demonstrates how disinformation operates at the institutional level through strategic omission, selective framing, and rhetorical sequencing. The piece cites Castelbaum et al. (2020) to portray autism as predominantly genetic, stating:

“A recent twin study highlights this complexity: researchers analyzed data from 366 identical twin pairs, including both autistic and non-autistic individuals (Castelbaum et al.). They found that 96% of the pairs both were autistic. However, there was variation in how disabling their autistic traits were. Twins with lower clinical impact were more similar in terms of their particular autistic traits than twins with higher levels of disability. This suggests that while genetics plays a strong role, individual experiences and environmental factors can shape the degree and impact of how autistic traits manifest.”

The author front-loads genetic determinism with the 96% concordance statistic, exploiting the public’s assumption that twin studies involve twins raised apart. By omitting contextual details, the author presents a misleading impression of genetic causality, leaving shared environmental influences largely unexamined. While it is unclear whether all twins were raised together, the framing still exploits assumptions about twin studies to assert determinism. The author then pivots:

“This suggests that while genetics plays a strong role, individual experiences and environmental factors can shape…”

While accurate in isolation, this pivot is a transparent rhetorical maneuver: environmental nuance is acknowledged only after deterministic framing, creating the illusion of balance while protecting the genetic-first narrative. This demonstrates authorial awareness of the limitation, transforming simplification into deliberate disinformation. The author likely knows the importance of the distinction between twins raised together and apart but structures the narrative to obscure it.

The author continues this pattern when noting developmental patterns that could challenge the narrative. The article addresses autism regression in relation to the MMR vaccination schedule:

“One of the most prevalent and harmful myths about autism is that it is caused by vaccines. This misconception originated from a now-discredited study published in the Lancet in 1998 by a former physician, Andrew Wakefield. The study focused on 12 children, eight of whom had developed autism after receiving the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, according to their parents. Wakefield’s methodology was deeply flawed: using cherry-picked cases, a very small sample, no control group, and relying on parental recall. It also did not account for the fact that the age at which children receive the MMR vaccine coincides with the onset of regressive autism in many children. Subsequent investigations have found Wakefield misrepresented the medical histories of some children in the study.”

The author acknowledges the timing coincidence but does not provide comparative data for unvaccinated children, alternative explanations, or context for why regression clusters at this developmental stage. This functions as a rhetorical dismissal: inconvenient patterns are noted only to be neutralized, maintaining the dominant genetic narrative and controlling public perception.

Together, the twin concordance pivot and the MMR regression discussion demonstrate a deliberate strategy of disinformation: statements are sequenced and framed to present illusory certainty, omitting crucial context that would undermine the genetic-first narrative. Autism is portrayed as primarily genetic, environmental influences are minimized, and patterns that could provoke inquiry are dismissed. This is intentional manipulation to control perception and guide discourse.

That this narrative appears under the APA banner shows how institutional disinformation has become normalized in science communication. The selective framing, pivoting, and rhetorical dismissal used by the author are textbook examples of a strategy that substitutes authority for transparency, guiding readers to a predetermined conclusion without intellectual honesty.

Cataloging every instance would be impractical; this case suffices to illustrate the method, subtlety, and institutional reach of such disinformation.

Conclusion

Institutions aiming to combat misinformation can, through obsession with controlling narratives, inadvertently—or deliberately—become purveyors of misinformation and disinformation themselves. The APA article’s misuse of Castelbaum et al.’s study exemplifies this pattern: selective framing, omission, and rhetorical management create an appearance of certainty, marginalize alternative viewpoints, and reinforce dominant narratives. This case reflects a broader systemic phenomenon across media, professional associations, and research institutions, where the mechanisms of framing, sequencing, omission, and rhetorical pivoting routinely shape public perception under the guise of combating “misinformation”. The result is a structural erosion of epistemic trust: critical inquiry is stifled, discourse becomes polarized, and complex issues are reduced to narratives that serve institutional authority rather than truth. Policing misinformation without humility, transparency, or acknowledgment of nuance actively generates the very phenomenon it purports to suppress.

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The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Parenting for “Self-Esteem”

The cult of “self-esteem” parenting is, at its heart, a paradox. Parents who are fixated on their child’s self-esteem often misunderstand what the concept even refers to. In popular psychology and advice manuals, “self-esteem” is treated like a fragile inner reservoir: the more you praise, affirm, and shield a child, the more this reservoir fills up. But in reality, what people call “self-esteem” is a canard. It is a cargo cult belief standing in for far more robust constructs such as stable personality traits (especially Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness) and, more importantly, a person’s locus of control.

Because personality forms the foundation of self-esteem, we begin by examining it before turning to locus of control.

Personality and the Biology of Self-Esteem

To understand self-esteem properly, we must first address personality, because these biologically influenced traits form the foundation upon which a person’s locus of control—and their resilience and agency—is built.

Self-esteem is not some fragile reservoir that can be endlessly topped up with praise; it is deeply rooted in personality, which is largely fixed and biologically influenced. Traits such as Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness shape how individuals perceive themselves, respond to challenge, and experience success or failure.

While there is some room for adaptation, self-esteem develops within the constraints of an individual’s trait profile: a child high in Neuroticism may always experience more self-doubt than a less neurotic peer, yet can still build confidence through experience and effort. Similarly, a highly conscientious child derives confidence primarily from competence, while an extraverted child may rely more on social feedback.

Extraversion further modulates the intensity with which one seeks social feedback, shaping the child’s internal sense of worth. In other words, self-esteem is the experience of personality in action—it emerges through the interaction of relatively fixed traits, not so much through praise or shielding.

Self-Esteem vs. Locus of Control

Building on the biological and personality foundations, locus of control is what truly predicts resilience, agency, and confidence. It refers to whether individuals believe their outcomes in life are primarily the result of their own actions (internal locus) or dictated by external forces like luck, chance, or others’ decisions (external locus).

What midwits call “low self-esteem” is often nothing more than a strongly externalized locus of control—people who feel life is happening to them rather than through them. What they call “high self-esteem” aligns with an internal locus of control: people who act as if their choices, persistence, and behaviors drive outcomes.

Unlike “self-esteem,” which is slippery, poorly defined, and notoriously hard to measure, locus of control has decades of empirical grounding. It predicts resilience, persistence, achievement, and even health outcomes. If parents truly wanted to cultivate what they mistakenly call “self-esteem,” they would encourage internal locus of control. Yet, paradoxically, the very strategies they use—constant praise, constant reassurance, esteem-shielding—drive children toward externalized control.

The Neuroscience of Praise

Neuroscience only deepens this irony. Psychiatrist Anna Lembke, in her work on the brain’s reward pathways, has shown just how counterintuitive praise can be. When children are praised for being “smart” or “talented,” their performance actually declines over time. Why? Because the dopamine hit of recognition detaches from the work itself and attaches instead to the image of competence.

Intelligence becomes a fragile badge to protect rather than a capacity to exercise. Children grow risk-averse, afraid to challenge themselves and lose the “smart” label; performance drops, risk-taking narrows, and effort itself is devalued. The paradox is that the very words meant to bolster “self-esteem” end up undermining resilience.

By contrast, when effort, persistence, and process are recognized, children not only perform better but also persevere longer in the face of difficulty. The brain’s reward circuits then reinforce agency rather than image. In other words, even at the neurological level, “self-esteem”–based praise undermines the resilience it intends to cultivate, while effort-based reinforcement strengthens the internal locus of control parents claim to want.

The “Watch-Me” Trap

Take the familiar “watch me, watch me” impulse. In toddlers, this is developmentally appropriate: it signals emerging agency and the child’s need to have their explorations witnessed. Between ages two and three, children use adults as mirrors to confirm their discoveries. But by four, the scaffolding should begin to pull back. Mastery itself—not parental attention—ought to provide satisfaction. By five, internal motivation, peer validation, and narrative-driven play should constitute the core of experience, and eclipse extrinsic, parent-mediated validation schemas.

When parents continue to indulge and praise every “watch me” beyond the age of appropriateness, they teach the child that the true worth of an activity lies not in the doing but in the witnessing. The intrinsic joy of climbing the slide, solving a puzzle, or drawing a picture gets externalized. Over time, the child’s inner narrative shifts from “I did this” to “this matters because someone else praised me for it.” That reinforcement loop entrenches an external locus of control and, ironically, creates the very fragility the parents sought to avoid.

This pattern usually traces back to a few common dynamics:

• Overpraising and over-validation earlier on

• Too much adult supervision —or even intervention— in free play

• Lack of peer socialization in unstructured-time settings

• The subtle lesson that adult approval equals safety, worth, or “play success”

The result is not resilience but dependency. Every time an adult rushes to affirm a child’s performance, the value of the act itself is externalized. Play turns into performance. Mastery turns into mimicry. Confidence becomes a reflection, not a foundation.

The Maternal Instinct and the “Don’t Crush Her Spirit” Mantra

A gratingly cliché phrase that echoes almost universally among mothers is, “I don’t want to crush her spirit.” It is presented as if the child’s inner vitality is a fragile flame, easily extinguished by correction, boundaries, or disapproval. Yet this phrase, though well-intentioned, reveals both a distortion in maternal instinct and a misreading of developmental reality.

Much of its force seems to come from retrospective projection. Women, reflecting on their own childhoods, often remember themselves as carefree, lively, and socially unencumbered before puberty, only to feel that something of that “spirit” was lost in adolescence. The story they often tell themselves —and me— is that this change came from the world pressing too hard on them. “Not enough praise, too much criticism, a failure of external validation”. But this interpretation is misleading.

What happens at puberty biologically, is far more explanatory, more structural, and almost inevitable:

• Neuroticism spikes. Hormonal shifts at the onset of adolescence—especially increases in estrogen and fluctuations in cortisol—drive sharp rises in anxiety, mood volatility, and self-consciousness, particularly among girls.

• Sexual vulnerability. The development of secondary sexual characteristics—breasts, body fat redistribution, and other visible changes—heightens self-consciousness and creates a biological susceptibility to sexual attention. This sensitivity is further amplified by social scrutiny and peer evaluation, intensifying awareness of one’s body and attractiveness.

• Dimorphism widens. Rapid growth in height and muscle mass in boys (especially upper-body strength, a key predictor of confidence) relative to girls destabilizes peer hierarchies and can shake self-assurance.

In this light, what many women later describe as their “spirit being broken” was not a matter of praise withheld or criticism delivered too harshly. It was a collision with the unavoidable realities of puberty: biology reshaping psychology, vulnerability reshaping social experience.

The maternal instinct to “protect the spirit” of the child is therefore less about preserving authentic development and more about compensating for this retrospective misattribution. Mothers are fighting the wrong enemy—reality itself. By insulating daughters from the normal and necessary experiences of frustration, correction, and disappointment, they may in fact reinforce a pattern of fragility—the very thing they fear.

The instinct itself is double-edged. On the one hand, it reflects a genuine impulse to nurture and safeguard. On the other, it risks becoming a trap, where every boundary feels like a threat to the child’s essence and every frustration is treated as an existential injury. The irony is that what is remembered as “crushed spirit” was often just the natural onset of neuroticism, sexual vulnarability, and social comparison—forces well outside parental control.

Good Enough Parenting

The term “good enough parenting” was coined by Donald Winnicott, a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, to describe the balance between nurturing and allowing a child space to develop independently. Good enough parenting is not indulgent nor neglectful; it is attuned, responsive, and restrained. Its goal is to cultivate resilience, agency, and intrinsic motivation, rather than constant reassurance or inflated praise.

To achieve this, parents must trust in the child’s own capacities while providing the conditions for safe growth. Evolutionary psychology reminds us that children evolved to learn through free, self-directed play, often in natural settings. Left to themselves, children explore at the edge of their comfort zones, practice risk assessment through trial and error, forge peer bonds, negotiate conflicts, and engage in symbolic and imaginative play that builds theory of mind. This “original curriculum” is optimal for developing the internal motivation and sense of mastery that modern parents often try—but fail—to manufacture through constant attention.

When adults intervene excessively, structuring every moment or dictating what constitutes “creative” activity, they hijack this learning process. A craft table or organized arts-and-crafts session may appear “enriching”, but it is not equivalent to spontaneous creation. Children learn to perform for approval rather than experiment freely. True creativity emerges from boredom, randomness, and open-ended materials; sticks, rocks, mud, or empty boxes often foster imagination far more effectively than pre-packaged or pre-imagined projects.

Parent ≠ Entertainer

Modern parenting culture exacerbates this problem by pressuring adults to entertain children constantly. Fear of boredom, fear of judgment, or fear of minor risk prompts parents to hover, micromanage, or structure every activity. Yet boredom is not the enemy—it is a gateway to creativity, reflection, and self-direction. When adults step in at every moment, children are denied the experience of self-soothing, self-regulating, and navigating peer dynamics. Overprotection, even from boredom, paradoxically creates fragility: even minor challenges, conflicts, and frustrations are removed from the child’s experience.

IT IS NOT YOUR JOB AS A PARENT TO ENTERTAIN YOUR KIDS.

To be clear —because I know “neglect” has succumbed to concept creep. Good enough parenting does not mean neglect. Rather, it is about trusting children to act within safe boundaries while providing the conditions for growth. This includes ensuring safety around genuinely hazardous situations, offering open-ended materials for exploration, observing without interference—or commentary, allowing peer conflicts to resolve naturally unless gravely dangerous (e.g. broken bones, deep lacerations, burns, etc.; not an ouchie or a scrape/bruise)*, and making room for boredom, silence, and self-initiated activity. The best gift parents can offer is not constant attention but the confidence that they do not need to give it. Children who learn to generate meaning on their own—without an adult’s gaze—develop real agency, intrinsic motivation, and authentic confidence, building the foundations for resilient, capable adults.

*Because I know some mothers will manufacture the tiniest, most trivial “safety” concern just to micromanage their child and smugly frame it as proof of their maternal superiority while they were only actually indulging their own neuroticism.

The Broader Paradox

When we put the pieces together, the pattern is clear:

• Parents misidentify “self-esteem” as the goal, when locus of control is the true driver of resilience.

• In protecting “self-esteem,” they inadvertently enforce external locus of control—the very condition that maps onto “low self-esteem.”

• Maternal instincts, driven by both immediate care and retrospective misattribution, amplify this dynamic.

• Adult interference in free play, creativity, and boredom compounds the problem, externalizing motivation past its developmental due date.

True confidence is forged through agency, failure, and mastery. It emerges when children realize repeatedly that their actions shape outcomes. By short-circuiting this process, “self-esteem” parenting produces brittle, dependent shells of confidence. The more parents try to prevent fragility, the more fragile their children become.

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The Existential Republic

I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%.

In 1933, German conservatives thought they could control Hitler. Two years later, they were being executed in their own homes. I spent weeks researching this question, desperately looking for counter-examples, for hope, for any time in history where people successfully stopped fascists after they started winning elections…

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a year ago · 4205 likes · Chris Armitage

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Let me start with the obvious: this is not a defense of Donald Trump—I’m far from a fan. For better or worse he has already been re-elected, he is already governing, and the world has not ended. What I am critiquing is the essay (linked above) that circulated claiming, in essence, that “once fascists take power democratically, they are never removed democratically.”

This claim forms the axis around which the piece spins, and it is both historically and logically problematic. The essay is a classic example of what I call a conjecture cascade: a chain of speculative premises stacked on one another until they feel inevitable. The cascade works like this:

Label a leader “fascist” (without establishing evidence).

Assert that fascists, once elected, always destroy democratic institutions.

Conclude that the leader in question will therefore inevitably destroy democracy.

Once these dominoes are arranged, everything else—rhetoric, color, fear—is used to make the chain feel real. The essay assumes what it should be proving.

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I. The Foundational False Premises

“The Institutions Are Captured by Fascists”

This is the core assumption his entire thesis rests on — that Trumpists have "captured the institutions." But that’s demonstrably false:

• Academia? Overwhelmingly left-leaning.

• Media? With rare exceptions (Fox, small outlets), mainstream outlets are left to “progressive”.

• Tech? Silicon Valley leadership leans left, culturally and politically.

• Corporate HR/culture? DEI programs and “progressive” policies dominate boardroom culture in Fortune 500 companies.

Trump’s base controls almost no major cultural or institutional levers. He's still fighting the establishment, not owning it. Precisely what we’d hope to see, precisely what our founding father’s foresightful frameworks were meant to ensure. This is not Weimar Germany where fascists purged the institutions — it’s a president clashing against bureaucracies and courts that often rule against him. That’s not authoritarianism.

“Trump has already dismantled the guardrails of democracy.”

This is the most critical illusion the author leans on, and the one that his entire crisis fantasy rests on. The assumption is that America’s institutions — judiciary, bureaucracy, legislature, media — have all fallen. That we’re already in post-democratic freefall.

But let’s look at what’s actually happened:

• Courts still block Trump constantly —a sign of intact checks and balances.

  • Whether it’s immigration restrictions, censorship fights, or executive orders — courts have repeatedly ruled against him, and the rulings stand. Trump appeals, yes — because that’s how the system works.

• He hasn’t abolished courts. He hasn’t jailed judges.

• He hasn’t built a shadow judiciary.

• This isn’t fascism. It’s litigation. Every president does it.

• Media still attacks him relentlessly.

If this were fascism, CNN would be nationalized, MSNBC would be shut down, and every journalist who criticizes Trump would be in prison.

But instead, what do we have? A nonstop barrage of critical coverage, opinion pieces, and open mockery. There’s still more danger being a right-wing commentator on a college campus than being a “progressive” one on cable news.

From whistleblowers in intelligence to bureaucratic slow-rolling in the DOJ and FBI, Trump has never had full control over the state apparatus — and they’ve worked against him at almost every turn.

The system is still functioning—at least as well or poorly as it has been.

If Trump truly had dictatorial power, he wouldn't be fighting judges, journalists, leakers, and state-level resistance — he’d be jailing them. But instead, they operate freely. The legal system is slow, messy, and frustrating — but it’s intact.

“Trump voters are crypto-fascists.”

The piece implies that 30–40% of Americans are fascism-curious or authoritarian-friendly as long as it “hurts the right people.” This is another lazy, dehumanizing generalization that replaces analysis with moral panic.

But:

Most Trump voters aren’t ideologues—especially 2024 voters.

• They’re disillusioned, economically anxious, culturally alienated, or just hate the regressive coastal elites.

• They voted for the guy who said: “What do you have to lose?”

  • Arguably we just escaped our 4 year dalliance with actual fascism—minus the nationalism— under the last regime.

• Voting for Trump ≠ supporting dictatorship.

People vote for all kinds of reasons — and most of them aren’t about wanting fascism. They’re about government and bureaucratic overreach, jobs, culture, immigration, crime, inflation, and identity.

If you think 74 million people are Nazis, you’re not serious.

You’re in a fantasy where you’re the Resistance, everyone else is a Stormtrooper, and the center doesn't exist. Dismissing half the country as fascist isn’t moral clarity, it’s epistemic collapse.

“We’ve already crossed the Rubicon.”

This is perhaps the most fatalistic (and self-serving) assumption in the whole piece: that “the window has closed,” that “it’s already too late.”

That’s a convenient belief. If it's already too late, then:

• You’re justified in abandoning normal politics.

• You don’t need to persuade anyone anymore.

• You can embrace rebellion and radicalism guilt-free.

Strategic Implications: Radical “Solutions”

Proposed strategies: nullification, selective noncompliance, secession, international intervention—are radical and dangerous. They:

• Encourage rebellion fantasies

• Avoid conventional civic engagement

• Increase polarization rather than addressing problems

Advocacy for extreme measures often undermines moderate democratic efforts. This is especially insidious when nothing about the current situation demands this level of fatalism.

Elections still happen. You don't have to like the candidates, but the process exists and is working.

Debate still exists. You can criticize the government, the courts, Trump, Biden, whatever. No one's disappearing in the night. Reform is still possible. If anything, we’ve had a deluge of voter engagement, public scrutiny, and institutional pushback on every side.

Saying “it’s too late” is how you avoid the hard work of political persuasion.

II. False Equivalence: “Elected = Hitler”

This is an egregiously lazy analogy. Just because Hitler was elected doesn’t mean every populist leader elected by a democracy is automatically Hitler.

• Was FDR Hitler because he won four terms and expanded executive power?

• Is Javier Milei in Argentina Hitler because he’s aggressively reforming a broken system?

• How about Narendra Modi in India?

The left is always crying "fascism," like the boy who cried wolf..

The Hitler analogy gets thrown around every election. It's narrative crack for the politically paranoid. It's not analytical thinking — it’s historical cosplay. “Comparing every strongman-adjacent populist to Hitler dulls our ability to distinguish real tyranny from policy disagreement.”

III. Conjecture Cascade in Action

This is where the domino chain of speculative assumptions takes full effect:

Trump is popular → Therefore, he’ll be elected → Therefore, he’ll seize dictatorial powers → Therefore, we’ll enter fascism → Therefore, we need to prepare for war/secession/revolution.

Trump governed before — and didn’t seize power. He had four years, and when he lost in 2020, he left. You can critique January 6, you can call his election challenges bad faith, but guess what? His second term didn’t start after an “insurrection”, it started after an election.

That’s not how dictatorships work. He’s still beholden to laws. He can’t unilaterally rewrite the Constitution. He’s been indicted — multiple times. Fascist dictators don’t get indicted. They make the judges disappear.

He doesn’t have bureaucratic control. The Pentagon isn’t following Trump around like a lapdog. The DOJ and FBI constantly leak against him. He’s fighting for survival within a government machine that resents him — that’s not what “consolidated power” looks like. There’s no dictatorship. There’s just a deeply polarized, gridlocked democracy — which is annoying, but not tyranny.

III. The Fantasy Continues

“Blue States Run the Country”

The “Blue State Coalition” idea rests on a fantasy of overwhelming liberal dominance — and unity — across geography and ideology.

• Most “Blue” states are purple. Go 30 minutes outside any major city and the politics flip fast: rural Massachusetts, Upstate NY, Inland California, rural Oregon, Eastern Washington.

• Demographic cohesion is a myth. The cultural, racial, and economic diversity of blue states makes unity harder, not easier.

• Compare that to red states like Texas or Florida, where there’s much tighter ideological coherence.

Any real secession movement or compact would immediately fracture along urban-rural lines within states. A “California secession” sounds cute until the farmers in the Central Valley tell SF and LA to shove it. Blue states are not monoliths. They're high-population liberal cities floating in a sea of red.

Ignoring Red State Power

He talks as if the only centers of power are leftist — completely forgetting:

• Texas’s economy rivals California's, with fewer regulatory and tax burdens.

• The Southeast: booming growth, pro-business environments, population inflows.

• Energy dominance: The U.S. fossil fuel sector is largely based in red states.

Red states aren’t leeching off blue states. They’re powering America’s energy grid, military infrastructure, and population growth. The idea that the Left could simply "opt out" and starve the machine is fantasy. California is a cultural powerhouse. Texas is an economic one. Pretending one can replace the other is juvenile.

IV. Historical Illiteracy

“Fascists Always Win”

The author cites roughly a dozen examples of fascists holding power for decades. But many examples come from less-developed or unstable post-war economies.

Counter-examples the essay ignored:

• Italy under Berlusconi (flirted with authoritarian populism)

• Austria’s FPÖ losing influence

• Bolsonaro in Brazil (defeated democratically in 2022)

• Le Pen repeatedly failing in France

Overuse of Historical Analogy

His use of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, Franco, etc. might be vivid, but it's also historically shallow. Context matters:

• These countries were post-war wrecks or unstable monarchies, with mass poverty, illiteracy, and no democratic tradition.

• America is not Spain in 1936. We’re a wealthy, nuclear-armed, politically complex republic.

Analogies don’t prove causality. They entertain, dramatize, and mislead more than they inform. A fascist takeover isn’t a Mad Libs exercise where you plug in “populist leader” and get “genocide.” Context is everything.

Ignores Leftist Fascism

The essay cherry-picks right-wing examples while ignoring leftist fascists. Stalin, Mao, and similar regimes meet fascist criteria in structure, brutality, and cult of personality.

Ignoring these examples creates a false narrative that fascism is exclusively right-wing. Fascism exists across the political spectrum. Selective history is political fanfiction, not analysis.

V. Fear Has Become Its Own Ideology

Ultimately, the essay reads less like strategy and more like catharsis:

• Doom-lust: craving collapse to feel morally justified.

• Control fantasy: imagining rebellion as cleansing.

• Fear as ideology: substituting paranoia for policy.

Fear feels vivid, but it’s not foresight.

The author's core mistake is mistaking fear for forecasting.

He builds a horror movie out of disconnected headlines, half-understood history, and a permanent state of dread. But fear isn’t analysis. Fear can feel accurate because it’s vivid — but that doesn’t make it true.

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Since I was old enough to have and formulate my own opinions, I have been pro-choice. However, my postion has evolved a great deal over the years as I encountered new ideas, philosophies, and honestly, when debating with skilled and knowledgable pro-lifers. Though I still remain firmly pro-choice, I have seen many of the issues within pro-choice advocacy that harm the position more than any pro-lifer ever could. I have seen a blind wailing take over this side of the discourse. Accompanied by fallacious arguments, unreasonable “reasoning”, all-or-nothing and win-at-all-costs —even if it’s our own humanity— approach which has appalled me the last few years. We will literally say anything no matter how incoherent, duplicitous, or even blatantly disceitful; and the opposition sees and will eventually exploit our rhetorical and philosophical failures.

I believe abortion should be legal, accessible, and protected — with clear exceptions for rape, incest, and medical complications. But I also believe in intellectual honesty. So again, I find myself more concerned about the quality of the arguments made in defense of abortion than the criticisms from its opposition.

You can support abortion and still be allergic to bad reasoning. In fact, you should be — because the wrong arguments don’t just weaken your position, they risk undermining the legitimacy of the entire movement.

Bodily Autonomy Is Insufficient

Bodily autonomy is a real and important right —but it is fundamentally a negative right, a right against interference. It protects you from physical intrusion or coercion. It protects your ability to act, move, reason, and preserve yourself, but it does not extend to acts you are physically incapable of performing yourself. Acts that require external intervention lie outside the scope of bodily autonomy and require a different ethical framework.

Bodily autonomy is a natural right, not a social invention. It flows from natural law and is limited by the same reality it arises from —things you can do by virtue of being human (e.g., reason, speech, movement, self-preservation). You cannot have a natural right to an act you are physically incapable of performing for yourself. Under this framework:

• Abortion fails because it requires external intervention.

• Lockean natural rights emphasize self-ownership and self-directed action: you have the right to preserve yourself, labor with your body, and control what you produce, but not the right to compel others to act on your behalf.

• Proto-Enlightenment thinkers like Grotius and Pufendorf insisted natural rights are tied to basic self-capacities and obligations not to interfere with others —never a right to demand someone else’s labor or for the government to guarantee it with force.

• Modern scholars like John Finnis affirm natural rights protect goods you can pursue yourself, not commissioning others to destroy someone else’s good.

A safe abortion fundamentally requires outside intervention. So unless we as pro-choicers are attempting to defend at-home/self-facilitated abortions, which I am not and hope the rest of us aren’t either*, the principle of bodily autonomy is beside the point.

*Though we will see later how a non-trivial amount of pro-choicers do not care about women’s safety.

While this shows bodily autonomy does not justify abortion on its own, it doesn’t mean that laws regulating abortion cannot consider other ethical frameworks. Rather, it shows that bodily autonomy alone is insufficient to fully justify abortion access because abortion inherently involves third-party intervention. The need for external agents to perform or assist the act places abortion outside the scope of bodily autonomy rights alone. Therefore, a different ethical framework is required to address the moral and legal questions surrounding abortion. Bodily autonomy simply cannot bear the full weight of the argument on its own.

“Bodily autonomy is not infringed by the law’s refusal to guarantee an act; the principle of bodily autonomy requires that the law stay out, not step in."

Consequentialist Arguments Don’t Hold Either

Many defend abortion on the grounds that it prevents hardship: poverty, single parenthood, child neglect, overburdened systems, even crime. But this is both morally and empirically weak. The problems of consequentialism aside —the logic assumes that ending a life is justified if it might prevent suffering— but more critically, the promised outcomes haven’t materialized.

Abortion access has not reduced poverty. It has not stabilized the family. It has not improved the lives of children. In fact, it often correlates with the opposite: generational fatherlessness, delayed family formation, increased dependency, and concentrated disadvantage. Abortion has not fixed crime either —the “Freakonomics” claim that it reduced crime was thoroughly debunked. Even if the statistical argument had held, the moral premise is horrifying. The idea that we should kill the poor to prevent future criminality echoes an unmistakable eugenic logic*—one that treats the lives of the disadvantaged as disposable for the supposed good of society. This is not a humanitarian argument; it is a deeply chilling one.

What’s more, the broader empirical claim —that access to abortion alleviates poverty or improves family outcomes— doesn’t hold up either. In many communities, the normalization of abortion has undermined sexual responsibility, destabilized family formation, and removed social and moral guardrails that once helped people build resilience under hardship. Abortion doesn't prevent dysfunction it often enables and perpetuates it.

If anything, the culture surrounding abortion has contributed to the very dysfunction it was supposed to alleviate: detachment from responsibility, commodification of life, and erosion of the social scaffolding that once protected the vulnerable. The consequentialist case fails not only on ethical grounds, but on outcomes. It simply doesn’t deliver.

* Planned Parenthood was founded by open eugenicists, including Margaret Sanger, who explicitly targeted poor and minority populations for population control. While this may not be the modern organization’s stated mission, the POSIWID principle (“the purpose of a system is what it does”) applies: abortion access continues to disproportionately reduce the births of black and poor children, regardless of intent. This historical context is why we as pro-choicers need to be especially cautious when using consequentialist arguments, to avoid echoing or enabling harmful eugenic implications.

The "No Uterus, No Opinion" Fallacy

Abortion is often framed as a private, personal matter—one in which only women should have a say. But that framing collapses under even light scrutiny. As we explored in the previous section, the consequences of legalized abortion are far from contained. They ripple outward—into families, communities, and entire societies. We’ve already seen its measurable impact on crime rates, fatherlessness, and intergenerational poverty.

Yet even raising these failures is often met with a familiar rebuke: If you don’t have a uterus, you don’t get a say.

But abortion is not just a “women’s issue.” It’s an everyone issue. A societal issue. It involves life, sex, responsibility, moral law, and the structure of society itself. To suggest that one sex —half the population— can’t weigh in is not just biologically reductionist, it’s a dodge.

While it is rhetorically potent, it’s philosophically flippant. It deliberately conflates personal experience with moral relevance —ignoring the fact that men are not only causally involved in every conception, but that abortion policy impacts them, women, children, and society at large. To follow such logic: only victims can debate justice, only combat veterans can shape war policy, and only billionaires can vote on taxes. That’s not how moral discourse in a society works.

If the argument is that abortion is a purely personal choice, it immediately collapses under the weight of its collective consequences: sex is interpersonal, conception is bilateral, and gestation produces a new human being —one that enters a complex web of relationships, responsibilities, and societal costs.

Even if we limit ourselves to self-interest: pro-choice policies don’t just benefit women; they benefit men, and often disproportionately so. In fact, many men benefit from abortion more than women do. Opportunistic, irresponsible, or even predatory men have found in abortion not a limit on their power, but a license for it. If sex no longer carries risk, and if women bear all reproductive responsibility, then men are absolved of theirs. Abortion has enabled a cultural detachment from consequences —not just for individuals, but for entire patterns of male behavior. This advantages avoidant, or exploitative men who favour the male sexual strategy that is least invested in long-term care, commitment, or fatherhood. When sex is fully decoupled from parental obligation —while still preserving women’s sole right to continue or terminate the pregnancy— men gain a cultural and moral permission structure to abandon responsibility. The same sexual revolution that promised women freedom has too often ended in asymmetrical abandonment: women bear the physical, emotional, and social costs of both childbirth and childrearing, while men enjoy the benefits of consequence-free sex.

This has downstream legal implications too. If life doesn’t begin at conception, then paternal obligation doesn’t either. Once life is redefined as beginning only when a woman chooses to carry to term , fatherhood becomes a retroactive imposition rather than a mutual consequence of conception —it no longer “takes two”. In effect, it shifts fatherhood from a biological reality to a contingent outcome —dependent not on shared agency, but on unilateral maternal choice. The man’s responsibility is no longer tied to conception, but to whether a woman retroactively decides to bring a child into existence —without his input, but with full legal expectation of his lifelong financial contribution.

Ironically, this may be a greater violation of bodily autonomy than legislation that merely declines to facilitate a woman’s abortion. In that case, the state withholds; in this, it compels commitment. A man can be held financially and legally liable for a child he had no legal standing to prevent, no say in continuing, and no rights to intervene in —even if he begged for abortion or offered to take full custody to prevent it. While abortion policy is framed as protecting female autonomy, it often comes at the cost of male autonomy —not just sexually, but existentially.

This is not to minimize the burdens women bear in pregnancy. But it is to underscore that abortion law, as it currently stands, doesn’t neutralize reproductive asymmetry —it weaponizes it. It cements an imbalance: women get sovereignty, men get obligation. And because this arrangement hinges not on biology, but on unilateral choice, it unmoors parenthood from any shared moral anchor. The result is not equity between the sexes —but a deep legal and ethical incoherence that leaves both sexes disoriented, and children even more vulnerable.

So, no, it is not just a “women’s issue”. It’s not even necessarily to their benefit unless we involve everyone and find a means by which equality and best outcomes are shared by individuals and society alike.

The Organ Donation Analogy

Another example of logically vulnerable assertions pro-choicers commonly make —leaving the entire movement open to unrelenting scrutiny— is the often-cited organ donor analogy: “You can’t be forced to donate a kidney, so you shouldn’t be forced to remain pregnant.” At first glance, this seems persuasive. But the analogy is chronologically truncated, missing crucial context that flips its meaning and actually undermines the pro-choice argument.

To explore the full breadth of this analogy, we must acknowledge—pro-lifers will force us to acknowledge—what came before the organ donation. In the context of consensual sex (~98.5% of sought after abortions are a result of consensual sex), that sex is like agreeing to donate the organ. When we remove that aspect from the analogy, we blind ourselves and open it up to exploitation. Having sex is akin to undergoing the “surgery” of commitment—it’s a voluntary act that can result in a dependent life— and subsequently asking for an abortion is like wanting your kidney back after donation.

Can you renege on an organ donation just because a few days after a successful surgery, you decided you wanted your kidney back? Of course not. Once you’ve donated, you cannot take it back—everyone on both sides would agree.

This analogy highlights a critical flaw: bodily commitments that create dependent lives cannot simply be undone on a change of heart. If anything, this supports the pro-life view: that bodily autonomy does not grant a right to terminate a dependent life you have carried into existence through prior voluntary actions.

The Euphemism Problem

One of the most damaging trends in abortion discourse is the increasing reliance on euphemisms —sanitized, emotionally manipulative, or intentionally vague terms that shield people from confronting the actual moral weight of the issue.

• “Reproductive health” is often a soft substitution for abortion itself. While it includes birth control and prenatal care, using it to mean abortion dilutes the seriousness of what’s being discussed. Abortion is not the same as treating an infection or getting a routine physical. If we can’t even say the word, we shouldn’t pretend we’re being intellectually honest.

• “Forced pregnancy” is even more hollow and inflammatory. It implies pregnancy is imposed by external actors, when in the vast majority of cases pregnancy is the natural biological result of consensual sex. Being forced to become pregnant (rape or assault) is not the same as becoming pregnant through voluntary sex and the state declining to terminate that pregnancy. Calling refusal to intervene “force” hijacks the moral weight of actual coercion and is a rhetorical weapon, not sound ethical reasoning.

• Other euphemisms cloud rather than clarify:

  • “Fetus” (used to dehumanize when unwanted, but swapped with “baby” when the pregnancy is desired).

  • “Access” (makes abortion sound like a consumer right, not a morally weighty medical choice).

Activists often frame abortion broadly as “healthcare.” This is a dishonest obfuscation. The vast majority of abortions are elective(~95-96%), not medical emergencies (~2%). Healthcare-type abortions are already universally legal and protected, and this framing sidesteps the ethical and public consensus that justifies reasonable limits.

Furthermore, this abuse goes beyond mere obfuscation. Activists pushing for elective abortions beyond 15 weeks advocate for procedures that carry greater health risks than continuing a healthy pregnancy. This contradicts claims that abortion is about protecting women’s health. The push for late-term abortion appears disconnected from medical realities, reflecting maximalist ideology rather than genuine healthcare concerns.

Elective Abortion Has a Reasonable Time Window

After around 15 weeks, abortion procedures become riskier than a healthy pregnancy —unless complications arise, in which case medical exemptions are the ethical and legal standard. The claim that people need 20+ weeks to decide whether to end a pregnancy doesn’t match reality or common sense.

We’re not talking about complex surgeries, home sales, or military contracts. We’re talking about a decision most people already have a default answer for before they even become pregnant.

From a young age, many develop a sense of whether they want kids — and under what conditions. That compass doesn’t suddenly form the moment a pregnancy test turns positive. People often know, instinctively and intellectually, what they’d do if they got pregnant long before it happens.

No other major life decision takes that long. People enlist in the military, buy homes, move across the country, get married, or apply to life-changing programs like the Peace Corps in far less time than a first trimester. Those are massive, irreversible commitments —yet 15 weeks is dismissed as insufficient time to consider pregnancy continuation.

It’s not just dishonest, it’s patronizing.

The Movement Has Won. So Why Risk It?

What makes this all so frustrating is that pro-choice advocates have already won the cultural argument in most of the United States.

Over ~93% of Americans support abortion access in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the mother’s life —that’s consensus! You can’t get more than 92% of people surveyed to agree that bicycles are a good invention.

Every single state in the U.S. has medical exemptions to save the mother’s life or address life-altering complications.

Moving the goalposts by insisting abortion is primarily “healthcare” when healthcare abortions make up a negligible percentage of total abortions(~2%)—and are already universally legal— reflects a fallacy of composition in order to justify a disingenuous and gaslighting approach. It evades the real ethical debate.

Despite this, activists push for abortion on demand up to birth—something even Europe, with its strong abortion protections, does not support. Most European countries allow elective abortion only up to 12–14 weeks, with specific justifications required afterward. By contrast, the U.S. average allows abortion up to 22–24 weeks —nearly twice as long.

In the U.S., maximalist activists reject reasonable limits not to defend women’s health, but because their identity is tied to maximalism. The longer they push beyond what’s ethically, medically, and publicly sustainable, the more they risk the entire cause.

A Final Moral Clarification

Here’s where I land, and I think more pro-choice advocates should join me: The pro-life movement holds the moral high ground.

Abortion is the act of ending another human life. We can and should acknowledge that. Acknowledging the gravity of abortion does not contradict supporting its legality. In fact, it’s the only way to ensure that legal abortion does not become morally empty.

If we pretend it’s “just a clump of cells” or hide behind euphemisms like “reproductive health” without acknowledging the stakes, we risk trivializing something deeply serious. That denial invites carelessness. But if we hold onto the truth —that abortion ends a developing human life— we safeguard the procedure from being used frivolously and preserve space for real ethical reflection.

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In conversations about transgender issues, a frequent refrain arises: “This is just like the gay rights movement.” The argument goes that just as society once misunderstood and resisted homosexuality—only to later embrace it as normal and natural—today’s skepticism or caution about transgenderism will likewise be proven wrong with time. Critics of any pushback are often told that opposition will be seen as bigoted in hindsight, and that we are merely on the wrong side of history as the same-sex marriage movement eventually won broad acceptance.

This comparison is powerful and emotionally compelling, but it also demands careful scrutiny. The historical trajectory of the gay rights movement and the contemporary transgender phenomenon differ in critical ways—conceptually, medically, and culturally. Understanding those distinctions is essential to forming an informed perspective, beyond the simplistic “same arc of progress” narrative.

What follows is an exploration of how the alleged “gay rights” movement and the current transgender movement diverge fundamentally—in their goals, their demands on biology, their impact on individuals, and the social and medical frameworks they invoke. This analysis aims to clarify the key differences often glossed over in mainstream discourse, shedding light on why equating the two movements outright risks obscuring urgent ethical and medical concerns.

The So-Called “Gay Rights” Movement Changed Definitions; Transgenderism Demands Surgery

The so-called “gay rights” movement was not a fight for basic legal protections—gay individuals already had equal rights under the law.

• What it pursued was a metaphysical and teleological redefinition of core institutions like marriage, shifting their meaning from procreation and complementarity to adult preference.

• Homosexuality never required surgery, sterilization, or medicalization to be expressed.

• Transgenderism, in contrast, requires invasive medical transformation to validate identity—often grounded in a kind of gnostic or dualistic claim that one’s true self is trapped in the wrong body.

• If “gender” were purely performative or socially constructed, no bodily modification would be needed. But the insistence on surgery reveals its foundational incoherence.

• Most alarmingly, this ideology now targets children—offering irreversible interventions for what are often transient or socially induced discomforts.

Transgenderism as Social Contagion, Not a Stable Identity

• Historically, gender dysphoria was rare (~0.01–0.03%) and almost exclusively found in early-onset, persistently dysphoric boys (Zucker, 2016).

• Over the last decade, we’ve witnessed a dramatic demographic shift: adolescent girls now make up the bulk of new cases, often with no childhood indicators.

• This rise corresponds to peer group clustering, social media immersion, and ideological grooming—matching the markers of a social contagion, not a natural minority identity (Littman, 2018).

• The closure of the Tavistock Centre and the findings of the Cass Review confirmed the ideological negligence embedded in the system (Cass Review, 2024).

• What we’re seeing isn’t the organic emergence of truth—it’s a cultural epidemic with institutional enablers.

Diagnostic Collapse and the Detransition Boom

• Past protocols required consistent, early-onset dysphoria and lengthy psychological vetting.

• Today, the “affirmation” model converts self-declaration into medical justification—eliminating gatekeeping entirely.

• The often-cited 4% detransition rate is based on outdated, non-representative studies (Dhejne et al., 2011).

• Recent data, especially among adolescent girls, show detransition rates between 20–30%, with some studies reporting over 50% regret or cessation (Vandenbussche, 2021; Kaltiala-Heino et al., 2018).

• This is not an outlier problem—it’s a predictable outcome of mass misdiagnosis and ideological medicine.

“Gender” Is an Academic Construct Rooted in Obfuscation

• The concept of “gender” was introduced by John Money, a psychologist now infamous for his unethical experiments that led to tragedy (Colapinto, 2000).

• Gender ideology simultaneously claims that identity is purely social and yet must be affirmed through irreversible physical intervention—a contradiction that exposes its conceptual bankruptcy (Stock, 2021).

• Unlike other social constructs, gender lacks consistent material reference and is largely deployed to obscure, rather than clarify, biological sex distinctions.

• It functions not as a descriptive tool, but as an ideological device to deconstruct reality itself.

Transgenderism Functions as Covert Conversion Therapy for Homosexuality

• Multiple long-term studies confirm that most gender-dysphoric children resolve into gay or lesbian adults if not medicalized (Singh et al., 2021).

• Transitioning these children blocks puberty, sterilizes them, and reroutes them into heterosexual-appearing lives—functioning as a new, state-sanctioned form of conversion therapy.

• While "affirmation" sounds compassionate, it prevents natural homosexual identity formation and imposes conformity through medical force.

• Among adult males, much of transgender identification is better explained by autogynephilia, a paraphilia virtually banned from discussion despite robust clinical evidence (Blanchard, 2005).

• In effect, the movement has positioned itself as a progressive project that quietly erases homosexuality.

Suicide Threats Are Used to Silence Dissent, Not to Save Lives

• The emotional core of the trans-rights narrative is the claim that without transition, trans people—especially youth—will die.

• But the largest long-term study, in Sweden, found that suicide rates remained high even after full medical transition (Dhejne et al., 2011).

• Transition may mask psychiatric distress temporarily, but it does not resolve root causes.

• Suicide risk is weaponized as a political bludgeon to suppress critical thinking, pause, or informed consent.

• We are not preventing death—we are pathologizing hesitation, and calling it mercy.

Transition as Teleological Suicide: The Body Rendered Functionless

• Medical transition is framed as an act of self-realization—but biologically, it is a self-nullification.

• These interventions destroy fertility, disrupt pair bonding, eliminate sexual function, and sever individuals from their reproductive and social future.

• Trans-identifying individuals are rendered inert in terms of biological life:

  • They cannot reproduce.

  • They struggle to bond or pair long-term.

  • They drift from both sexes and from any coherent role within society.

• This is not said out of cruelty, but biological realism:

  • A human body cannot remove its own purpose and still expect to flourish.

• Transition doesn’t prevent suicide. In many cases, it is suicide in slow motion—state-sanctioned, culturally affirmed, and biologically irreversible.

We are not saving lives.
We are euthanizing purpose—and calling it progress.

This Isn’t the Next Civil Rights Movement—It’s the Next Medical Atrocity

• We are told that this is like gay rights in the ’60s, or interracial marriage in the ’50s.

• But the closer historical parallel is lobotomy for hysteria:

  • A moment in which institutional medicine, media, and public policy converged around a harmful, unproven, and invasive intervention.

  • A procedure marketed as healing, executed on vulnerable people (especially women), and later discredited—only after generations had been ruined.

• Today’s gender surgeries are not done by villains. They are done by believers—believers in data that’s cooked, ethics that are circular, and institutions that no longer question themselves.

This is not Stonewall.
This is Freeman.
This is the 21st-century lobotomy, performed not on the skull, but on the self.

And just like before, the apologies will come—but too late.

And once again, we’ll be left asking:
How did we let this happen?

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